Bellows Falls Times

Miscellany.

One.

One hour of the new day gone!
One more car, with its sixty soundless wheels laden with records of human life, swept, with no ringing of bell, across the highways and around the curves of earth into the depot of Eternity, whose keeper is Jehovah!

One!
The little ormolu clock from its festooned bracket above the mantle heralds the tidings throughout the silent room and the canary, asleep in his ivory ring, leaps at once, full throated and open-eyed, into a jubilate that floods the air with the tender trills of song.

One!
We turn off the gas--the bird-song ceases.
We draw aside the curtains, throw back the shutters, open the windows, and lean across the casement into the night.
How silent it is! And yet the silence, as we lean and listen, quickens with voices whose ebb and flow made once the low drones of our life to bud and blossom as the rose; make still, and will make forever, the Alpha and Omega of love's sweetest dream.
The moonlight lays its band of silver across the looseness of our hair, and up on our temples, burdened with fever throbs of fancy overwrought, the fingers of the wind are pressing, as the mother's lips, through a night so long ago.
The wing of sleep covers the city, as the wings of a bird her brood; but the lights of heaven shine through, illuminating cathedral spire and cloister-wall--the high halls of the rich and the low roofs of the poor; and, over all, is the banner of God's love; His protecting care, and the heaven of His holiness.
The "voiceless night" grows voiceful.
A sound breaking from wine-red lips, floats from the sweet soul of the past to the fountains in the still aisles of our being, and lo! a shower of glittering drops over the blooms so dark with dust of dreary days, and a song through all the stillness like the singing of the sea.
An odor of violets from the wet ways of an old, old woodland is folded under the plumage of the night, and the calm leaves of life's first lilies seem rustling to the buds, storm-shaken, but haply spared for the sweetening of later days.

Que!
One voice above all others from out the sepulchre of the past! One hand--fairer than all others--reaching across the urn whose very rim is under the ashes of a burnt-out hope!
One face with its frame of carven locks, and lips like palest primrose--its delicate cheeks, and lids with fringe of amber--its brows where no red blood is and its temples with no purple of living!

One day discrowned and desolate, the life of all its hours face to face with the death of all its dreams, and something sweeping through its stillness like sound of ship going down to the black heart of the sea, and sound of waves closed closely up above and sealed with seal of thunder.
One faith, fair and fruitful, that not the laboring of years, nor men, nor gods nor doom, nor death can alter!
One gleam of the far-off silver of repose over all the waters of waiting.
It is enough!
We close the window and its shutters rearrange the damask and the lace, put back the stand with its basin and ladder of ivy, and just as the clock is telling the passing of another hour, go silently to the sweet heart of our slumber, and to a sacred dream of--One!