Alleluia!”
Mother’s Hymn at Eventide
A little girl would clutch her mother’s hand and the two would go through the tall grass of an English meadow to a stile. There they both loved to stand to watch the sunset. Just when the last crimson streak was dying in the west, the mother would sing, in her rich Welsh voice:
“Forever with the Lord!
Amen, so let it be;
Life from the dead is in that word,
’Tis immortality.”
The manner in which the woman greeted the passing of the day left a memory with the young daughter which the latter carried with her through the years, and brought with her when she came to America. “Sing, kitten,” the mother would sometimes exclaim. Then, with faces still set westward, the daughter would chirp with her little voice, and the two would sing:
“Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him I roam,