Dinah was a slave. Her mistress was an Indian woman, into whose dark
mind not a single ray of gospel light had ever penetrated. She lived
among a small tribe on the borders of Tennessee, and although at the
age of forty, or a little over, she was called Old Dinah. The Indian
mistress and all her servants had been baptized by a Roman priest;
but why, or wherefore, none of them knew. Dinah said, in relating the
circumstance, "I allers thought the white folks had something to tell
that we did not know about, and I used to think what could it be. When
the missionaries come here with the Bible, then I know what it is."
Her veneration for the "Good Book," as she always called it, was
remarkable. Getting on a stool in her little cabin one day, I noticed
on a shelf, far above the reach of her little ones, a pile of torn,
dingy bits of paper. I said, "What have you here, Dinah?"
"Oh, missus, don't mind _them_ now. I picks 'em up when I come from the
meeting. I spose the children throws 'em out of the school-house, but I
thinks it may be they are pieces of the Good Book, and when I learns to
read I can find 'em out."
Dinah did learn to read. She had a family to provide for, and Saturday
was the only day in the week allotted to her in which to look after
her little patch of corn and potatoes, cook their food, and prepare
her children for the Sabbath. The morning she gave to her farming in
summer, then the washing and mending, and at night after the children
were washed and stowed away for sleep, she would take the youngest
on her back, and, tired as she often was, trudge away two miles to
the mission station; and favored indeed was the teacher who could get
rid of the earnest appeal, "Let me learn just a little more," before
the morning dawned. Every Sabbath morning a little time was spent in
imparting to her Daniel the lesson of the previous evening--his master
living in a village some miles distant, so that he could not secure
any other instruction; but Daniel soon outran his teacher, and having
a warm Christian heart, learned to expound as well as read the Good
Book, much to the edification of his colored friends. This was also an
unfailing source of comfort and grateful recollection to Dinah. Once
when listening to his fervent appeals, she said to me, while the big
tears chased each other joyously down her cheeks, "Oh, missus, look at
Daniel! I taught that man his a, b, c, and now he knows so much, and I
can only pick out a little of the Good Book yet."
In the preaching of the gospel she took great delight, and never
but once, during our nine or ten months among that people, do I
remember her being absent from our meetings on the Sabbath. It was
in the female prayer-meeting that Dinah was invaluable. Here all her
tenderness of conscience, her desire for instruction, her delicacy
and tact in eliciting it, not only for herself but for the benefit of
others whose spiritual wants she had made her study, and above all,
her meek and earnest supplications, rendered her a helper never to be
forgotten, and I loved her for the image of my Master shining in her
face.
"NO-ACCOUNT JOHNNY."