Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/292

 chanted song float along down the beautiful pathway. Some through the crowds of bizness, and gay pleasure-*seekers' through pleasures and palaces. Some into the dark highways, where Want and Misery walk hand in hand. Some down into the tomb, some up the mount of crucifixion. There are paths, long, cold, shinin', that go up the mountain side, where the glitterin' tops gleam and beckon, and we are willin' to drop every weight that would hender us from climbin'.

"Oh, those times to look back upon when life wuz to be chosen, or what proved to be (onbeknown to us) a livin' death! How calm the fields lay under the light of that autumn sky, long flat fields, green and calm and stretchin' back to the quiet woods. How the road in front lengthened out in a long, shinin', yellow-brown ribbon with cozy sheltered homes layin' by its side. How soft and cloud flecked wuz the sky overhead, broodin' down over the sheltered home nests. Only a question to be made and answered, a breath of air, light thing indeed, lighter that the lightest fleck of soft blue-gray cloud overhead, maybe a few tears, a farewell not so loud as the lowest bird song in the branches along the brown wayside fences. Ah! but has there not been times since when that low word has risen into a mighty voice that filled the skies of the worlds, this world and the onknown? The great dread that it wuz indeed final, that nowhere, nowhere could the lives that touched each other, and then drifted so wide asunder, would ever meet side by side agin.

"Oh, the blindness, the fatal blindness of ignorance, the mistakes that arise from pride, from ambition, from any and every cause, and whose fatality cannot be seen until afterward, until the sun has gone down and the