Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/32

 visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: and I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory."

In spite of myself the words thrilled me with their vivid, menacing suggestiveness, and I listened intently to what followed. It seemed apparent that the end of the world was at hand. The signs were taken up one by one, and it was shown, to my growing discomfiture, that all had been fulfilled: nothing remained but the sounding of the last trumpet, which, according to the preacher—he seemed even to regard it as highly probabl—might take place that very night. By the time he had reached this point my disquietude had become abject fear, and I joined fervently in the last prayer. But why had I never been told of this imminent danger? When we got back from church, it was a very subdued boy who sat by his father's side, a Bible open on the parlour table in front of him. I read with a feverish haste to prove my changed way of life, and, it must be confessed, also to keep off as long as possible the hour of bed-time. There was a horrible plausibility about what I had heard. The concluding words kept ringing in my ears. "I see no reason why it should not be this very night." "Wouldn't it, in fact, be just the kind of thing that would happen at night?" I asked myself piteously; and I was tormented by a dread of the hideous trumpet note, by a bloody moon, and by the apparition of dead and shrouded bodies, rising up with glaring eyeballs and tied jaws and all the mouldering signs of the grave—dreadful, galvanized corpses, risen from their wormy beds to meet their Lord in the air. At length I could put off my bed-time no longer. I could see my father was not convinced by the open Bible, and, with his usual suspiciousness, had become curious