“And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven,
saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the
earth!”
Besides reading the Bible with the family every evening, I read a
chapter from it each morning before rising.
My Bible was a very small one, with exceedingly fine print. Pressed
between its pages were some flowers that I was very fond of; especially
was I of the spray of pink larkspur, which had the power of bringing
very distinctly before my mind's eye the stubble fields (gleux) of the
Island of Oleron where I had gathered it.
I do not know exactly how to explain the word gleux, but it means the
stubble which remains after the grain is harvested, and those fields of
short pale yellow stalks that the autumn sun dries and turns a
bright golden. In these fields upon the Island, overrun by chirping
grasshoppers, late corn-flowers and white and pink larkspur come up,
grow very high, and blossom.
And upon winter mornings, before beginning to read, I always looked at
the spray of flowers which still retained its delicate color, and there
appeared to me a vision of the Island, and I longed for the summer time
and for the warm and sunny fields of Oleron.
“And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven,
saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth!
“And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the
earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”
When I read my Bible for myself, having then my choice of passages,
I either selected that grand portion of Genesis wherein the light
is separated from the darkness, or the visions and the marvels of
Revelation. I was fascinated by its imaginative poetry, so splendid and
yet so terrible, which has, in my opinion, never been equalled in any
other book of mankind. . . . The beasts with seven heads, the signs in
the heavens, the sound of the last trumpet were well-known terrors that
haunted and enchanted my imagination.
In a book, a relic of my Huguenot ancestors, printed in the last
century, I had seen pictures of these things. It was a “History of the
Bible,” and the weird pictures illustrating the visions of the Book of
Revelation, invariably, had dark backgrounds. My maternal grandmother
kept this precious book, which she had brought from the Island, under
lock and key in a cupboard in her room; and as it was still my habit to
go there at the sad hour of dusk, it was then that I usually asked her
to lend me the book, so that I might turn over its leaves as it lay upon
her lap. In the dim twilight until it was too dark to see, I gazed at
the multitude of winged angels who were flying rapidly under the curtain
of blackness which presaged the end of the world. The heavens were
darker than the earth, and in the midst of the great cloud masses, there
was visible the simple and terrifying triangle that signified Jehovah.