Author: George MacDonald

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13:

"My hearers, we grow old," said the preacher. "Be it summer or be it spring with us now, autumn will soon settle down into winter, that winter whose snow melts only in the grave. The wind of the world sets for the tomb. Some of us rejoice to be swept along on its swift wings, and hear it bellowing in the hollows of earth and sky; but it will grow a terror to the man of trembling limb and withered brain, until at length he will long for the shelter of the tomb to escape its roaring and buffeting. Happy the man who shall then be able to believe that old age itself, with its pitiable decays and sad dreams of youth, is the chastening of the Lord, a sure sign of his love and his fatherhood." It was the first Sunday in Advent; but "the chastening of the Lord" came into almost every sermon that man preached. "Eloquent! But after all, can this kind of thing be true?" said to himself a man of about thirty, who sat decorously listening. For many years he had thought he believed this kind of thing-but of late he was not so sure. Beside him sat his wife, in her new winter bonnet, her pretty face turned up toward the preacher; but her eyes-nothing else-revealed that she was not listening. She was much younger than her husband-hardly twenty, indeed. In the upper corner of the pew sat a pale-faced child about five, sucking her thumb, and staring at the preacher. The sermon over, they walked home in proximity. The husband looked gloomy, and his eyes sought the ground. The wife looked more smiling than cheerful, and her pretty eyes went hither and thither. Behind them walked the child-steadily, "with level-fronting eyelids." It was a late-built region of large, common-place houses, and at one of them they stopped and entered. The door of the dining-room was open, showing the table laid for their Sunday dinner. The gentleman passed on to the library behind it, the lady went up to her bedroom, and the child a stage higher to the nursery.