Recently a most attractive child was for ten days, with her charming young mother and baby brother, the guest of the Villino. To console her on departure she was promised another Plain Eliza, should such a one ever be vouchsafed the world. Her mother writes: “She prays and makes me pray for the new Plain Eliza every day, and I think fully expects to see her come shooting down from Heaven.”
A very dear child this, with a heart and mind almost too sensitive for her four years. Many delicately pretty sayings are treasured of her. She must have been about three when her first religious instruction was given her. It made a profound impression. For months afterwards she would date her experiences from the day of this enlightenment.
“You know, mammy, that was before Jesus was born to me!”
Her father is at the front. He has not yet seen his little son, the arrival of whom was so much desired. This baby, an out-of-the-way handsome, healthy child, is a prey to the terrors which it will be yet mercifully many years before he can understand. He cannot bear to be left alone a moment, and wakes from a profound sleep in spasms of unconscious apprehension. Then nothing can soothe him but being clasped very close, the mother’s hand upon the little head, pressing it to her cheek. “He is nothing,” said the doctor, “to some of the babies I have seen this year.” It is not astonishing; but how pathetic! These little creatures, carried so long under an anguished heart, come into the world bearing the print of the universal mystery already stamped on their infant souls.
When will the dawn arise over a world no longer agonized and disrupted? When will the wholesome joys and the natural sorrows resume their preponderance in our existence? Surely every man’s own span holds enough of trouble to make him realize that here is not our abiding-place, and long for the security of the heavenly home. Perhaps it was not so. Perhaps we had all fallen away too much from faith and simplicity, and we needed this appalling experience of what humanity can inflict upon humanity, when Christ and His cross are left out of the reckoning.
“The world has become profoundly corrupt. There will surely come some great scourge. It will be necessary to have a generation brought up by mourning mothers and in a discipline of tears,” said a man of God in what seemed words of unbearable severity, a year before the war broke out.