It was
only when they relieved him of his burden, and gently prepared to carry
the senseless girl among them back to her father's house, that he spoke;
and then, in faint entreating tones, he besought them to let him hold
her hand as they went, so that he might be the first to feel her pulse
beat--if it yet moved.
They turned back by the way they had come--a sorrowful and slow-moving
procession! As they passed on, the reader again opened the Sacred Book;
and then these words rose through the soothing and heavenly tranquillity
of the first hours of night:--
'Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not
thou the chastening of the Almighty:
'For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make
whole.'
CHAPTER 26. RETRIBUTION.
As, in the progress of Life, each man pursues his course with the
passions, good and evil, set, as it were, on either side of him; and
viewing their results in the actions of his fellow-men, finds his
attention, while still attracted by the spectacle of what is noble and
virtuous, suddenly challenged by the opposite display of what is mean
and criminal--so, in the progress of this narrative, which aims to be
the reflection of Life, the reader who has journeyed with us thus far,
and who may now be inclined to follow the little procession of Christian
devotees, to walk by the side of the afflicted father, and to hold with
him the hand of his ill-fated child, is yet, in obedience to the
conditions of the story, required to turn back for awhile to the
contemplation of its darker passages of guilt and terror--he must enter
the temple again; but he will enter it for the last time.
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