Blairtown had a population of some eight thousand. There was a
Presbyterian church to which Dan and his father went regularly, sitting
in the bare pew when the winter's storms beat and rattled on the panes,
or in the summer sunshine, when the flies thronged the window casings,
when the smell of the pews and the panama fans and the hymn-books came
strong to them through the heat.
One day there was a missionary sermon, and for the first time in its
history a girl sang a solo in the First Presbyterian Church. Dan Blair
heard it, looked up, and it made a mark in his life. A girl in a white
dress trimmed with blue gentians, white cotton gloves, and golden hair,
was the soloist. He knew her, that is, he had a nodding acquaintance
with her. It was the girl at the drug store who sold soda-water, and he
had asked her some hundreds of times for a "vanilla or a chocolate," but
it wasn't this vulgar memory that made the little boy listen. It was the
girl's voice. Standing back of the yellow-painted rail, above the
minister's pulpit, above the flies, the red pews and the panama fans,
she sang, and she sang into Dan Blair's soul. To speak more truly, she
_made him a soul_ in that moment. She awakened the boy; his collar felt
tight, his cheeks grew hot. He felt his new boots, too, hard and heavy.
She made him want to cry. These were the physical sensations--the
material part of the awakening. The rest went on deeply inside of Dan.
She broke his heart; then she healed it. She made him want to cry like a
girl; then she wiped his tears.
The little boy settled back and grew more comfortable and listened, and
what she sang was,
"From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral stra--ands."
Before the hymn reached its end he was a calm boy again, and the hymn
took up its pictures and became like an illustrated book of travels, and
he wanted to see those pea-green peaks of Greenland, to float upon the
icebergs to them, and see the dawn break on the polar seas as the
explorers do.... He should find the North Pole some day! Then he wanted
to go to an African jungle, where the tiger, "tiger shining bright,"
should flash his stripes before his eyes! Dan would gather wreaths of
coral from the stra--ands and give them to the girl with the yellow hair!
When he and his father came out together from the church, Dan chose the
street that passed the soda-fountain drug store and peeped in. It was
dark and cool, and behind the counter the drug clerk mixed the summer
drinks: and the drug clerk mixed them from that time ever afterward--for
the girl with the yellow hair never showed up in Blairtown again. She
went away!