I saw no trouble in the fourth word; for I had already given her an insight into her relationship towards a Creator. This I had done by spelling slowly the hallowed name, and pointing upwards with extreme reverence, pointing also towards the church, which was visible from the windows up stairs. Created seemed to me harder of interpretation. After much thought I drew the figure of a blacksmith at work, and wrote down the word making. I then pointed to the word created, to signify that making and creating were similar acts. I had been told by a friend how an ingenious lady once explained and to a deaf child by tying a thread between a pen and an inkstand. The piece of thread was and. I therefore, on my system of extracting much meaning from few materials, tied together the bottle and water-jug which I had already used to explain in and beginning. For the word earth I touched the ground, and swept my finger backwards and forwards on it.
After going over in this careful manner the sentence whose important meaning I desired to elicit, I resolved to let it sink into her mind. For after all, it is not the quantity of instruction one gets that benefits, but that part of it which is well digested.
In the evening, when I considered the digestive process might be accomplished, I told her father what I had done. He commended my prudence in not cramming her. My difficulty as to how the child would know the difference between in and beginning he shared. He agreed in the propriety of omitting the from the explanation. He seemed to doubt whether I had really imparted an idea of the Supreme Being by pointing upwards reverentially, inasmuch as I explained heaven in much the same way. Our perplexity was that we could not ascertain what real notion she formed as to meanings of words; for she always imitated with accuracy the acts and gestures either of us made use of in conveying an explanation.
The more I thought on it the less I was satisfied. Painful as it was to part with our darling, especially in her state of weakened health, brought about too by our misjudging care, our duty demanded the sacrifice, and we dared not refuse. What we terribly feared was, mischief befalling her in the course of some school-game. That unhappy opening in the skull-bone was always our most sensitive point.
When, however, we visited the school, and found her among companions like herself, saving that their wiser parents had better guarded them from cures; found her, so to speak, in a sheltered nook where the influences of many minds acting on hers could bring into play her intelligence and develope whatever germs of good were in her, we experienced a relief we had not hoped for, and thought instinctively of the wind tempered to shorn lambs.
When she came to us at the end of the second year, and repeated the few words she had been taught to articulate—papa, mamma, I am happy—it seemed as if so great a stream of happiness could not have flowed to us through any other channel. How truly she was our angel.
She had been at school wearing on to five years when a somewhat severe illness attacked her father. Mary, informed of it by letter, begged to be allowed to nurse him. Her father afterwards said that he found her mere presence in the room, whether still or in movement, had a soothing effect upon him, more than the prescribed opium could exert. Perhaps from being habituated to read thought on the countenance before it took expression in words, she was better than another able to minister relief to hidden suffering. Perhaps it was the microscope of her very strong affection that assisted her eyesight, and rendered visible symptoms that the sufferer himself would have suppressed. Alas! when in the course of only a few weeks afterwards, she herself required done for her similar offices to those she was now performing, much as we loved her and would with thankfulness have taken her great agony on ourselves, if thereby to ease her, this same microscope revealed little to our eyes that availed her in way of relief.
Originally not of a strong constitution, and cruelly shattered by the cures she had undergone, the most we had hoped for was, by excess of care, to wrap her from rough contact with life, and enable her sweetness of disposition to mature, as it were, within a conservatory, instead of exposed to open storms.
She seemed in an excellent state of health, as good, that is, as she ever enjoyed, when she went back to school after nursing her father through his illness. She had spoken of nursing us both when we were old and tottering, and herself an erect woman; so that those justified premonitions of early death, which are sometimes known to have occurred to the mind of a child, had not affected her.
As a proof that the tone of her mind was healthy, I give here her reply to the Rev. Bernard Oldtrack, Dr. Oneway’s young curate, who was generously attempting to show her that, as faith entered by hearing, a padlock on this door caused the goods to be taken away again. She repeated the beautiful story of how divine love, walking in flesh and doing good, had bidden deaf ears be opened, and a bound tongue be unloosed. There were some additions in her version of the story that were not uninteresting, considering who she was that told it, and amongst whom it was current.
She conceived that we, her father and mother, had spent much money and taken her to many places, in the hope that some one would speak to her sealed ears the command—“Ephphatha;” but the proper way to speak this word was known to no man. At last, however, when all that had ever lived stood before Him—by whose blessed lips that word had been spoken—He would speak it again. They, whose tongues had, through life, remained unused and free from stains, like the swords in a cutler’s shop that are carefully kept in sheaths, would now begin to flourish them in hymns; while the rest of the immense crowd, having abused the power of speech when on earth, would find their tongues thereby grown rusty, and would, with difficulty, draw them out, like bloody swords glued in scabbards.
This was her illustration.
