LIGHT AND SHADE.
The saddest train upon which the writer ever took passage was the
Hospital Train, with its maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the
still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to Nashville, Tenn., just after
the battle of Chickamauga. There was no lack of ventilation, for some
of the cars were platforms--the kind that make Martyrs, but not
Presidents. Not much finish in precious woods anywhere that you could
see. It rained heavily and persistently through the twelve hour trip,
and there the wounded lay strewn about on the platforms, and packed
away in the box-cars. But you heard less complaint than is made any day
on a palace-train because one refractory rose-leaf is crumpled. The
suffering was silent, and all the more terrible because it was so. The
stricken boys had started for home, and there was a strange, ghastly
cheerfulness upon their faces, that was sadder than sadness. They
talked about "God's country," whither they were bound, till your heart
ached to think how many of them would find "God's acre" before they
reached the blessed North.
The bearing of that wounded brigade was wonderfully glorified with the
grace of patience. It taught you what splendid stuff human nature is
made of. They tell about men of iron, and nerves of steel, and look as
if they thought they had said something--as if there were anything
_quite_ so good to make a man of as the flesh that can quiver and
the nerve that can twinge. Those cars on that Chattanooga Road were bad
enough, though the reader cannot get the idea unless he amuses himself
by riding upon a lively trip-hammer; but of all wheeled contrivances,
the ambulance that was used in the late war is the most spiteful. You
would naturally think it "an invention of the enemy"--that he had
devised it for the special purpose of finishing the people he had not
quite killed with gunpowder. The jolty, jerky thing, with wolf-trap
springs that snap at every inequality in the road, and send waves of
pain through the shattered frames of its occupants, is, for a merciful
device, certainly the most cruel. Be our prayer, that neither hospital
train nor ambulance will be needed evermore in all the land!
Did you ever see troops of young swallows peppering the southern slope
of a broad-roofed barn, just as they are making ready to leave for a
sunnier clime? What confusion of happy tongues, what half-human chatter
and frolic. If you would see the same picture later in the season,
after the swallows are all gone, just board a passenger train in
December upon a road lined with schools for girls, like the Chicago
and Milwaukee, when the flocks are let loose and bound home for the
holidays. The birds are gayer and brighter, and worth a gallon of
swallows every one of them, no matter whether swallows are higher than
sparrows or not--half a farthing apiece--but they recall the picture on
the barn-slope, till the girls and the birds seem to be twittering over
the same dish of joyous expectation.
You had left Milwaukee a little dull and a trifle surly, but as the
train halts along at those beautiful villages where the dove-cotes are,
and the merry creatures throng aboard, and captivate you and take the
train, and fill it with laughter and ribbons, and jaunty little hats
about as big as the palm of your hand, and sit down three in a seat,
when their flounces will let them, and talk all at once and all the
time, then you, too, brighten up and grow human, and wish you were a
boy or a girl again, so that you could see things rose-colored, and
think it blessing enough to live, and be happy without a plan. Whoever
says gravely to himself, "I am going to be happy to-day," is pretty
sure to have a sober-sided time of it. I do not think anybody can
_toe_ happiness, as the children used to toe a crack when they stood up
to spell. A great deal of the commodity comes to a man when he is not
looking for it, just as a side-glance sometimes reveals a star that the
astronomer had been vainly seeking with the direct gaze.
The Lord has arranged things wisely for our mere physical delight. He
has not planted all the violets in the world in one place, neither has
He fenced in the roses between particular lines and parallels of
latitude and longitude, nor fashioned them to grow up close under our
noses. But we go carelessly along, and we get a whiff of the violets
down there in the grass, and the lilacs over yonder in the yard, and
the roses in the fence corner, and they all go to make up the fragrance
and the beauty of the day, though we had not been looking for any of
them. It is the indirect ray from everything, whether it be the sun or
the drop of dew, that unravels and makes visible the beauty of the
world.
There is a great deal said about _spheres_. A planetary stranger would
think that about half the world were engaged in getting a lesson in
Spherical Trigonometry--man's sphere and woman's sphere. Most of the
unhappiness, uneasiness, and tendency to bolt spheres, is due to an
impression many people unconsciously entertain, that the Lord did not
understand His business when He made the Gardener and his wife--that
he could have made a better job of it. Take an open-browed,
clean-hearted girl, blessed with a fair share of beauty of some kind,
and then make her believe that she is about the neatest piece of work
the Lord ever made, and _keep_ her believing so, and you will have a
woman by-and-by, if heaven doesn't want her before, who will never
trouble herself much about spheres and tangents, or any other problems
of Social Geometry, but will just brighten and sweeten the world all
the days of her life.
The day those school-girls came into the car there was a sour-visaged
man in it whom you had been watching. His features were all huddled
together--he had done it himself--his eyes, nose, mouth and chin all
puckered to a focus of chronic anxiety. He looked as if he had been
getting those features all ready to be poured through a funnel into a
vinegar-barrel. You were curious to observe the effect of the merry
inroad upon him. At first not a movement. He seemed as sulphuric as
ever. Some of the girls threw little smiles his way, though not at him,
and some of them _hit_ him, and he began to watch them. They were
too many for him, and he concluded he wouldn't run into the
vinegar-barrel just yet.
It was curious to see that small mass-meeting of features break up and
distribute themselves around his face, each in its place, until his
countenance got about as broad as a sun-dial, and about as bright as
the dial does when the sun shines on it. He had been thinking for a
long time that he needed medicine of some kind. As he would have worded
it himself, "he felt a good eel out of kilter," but it was young folks
he needed all the while, and nothing at all that a druggist could sell
him.