This is the light that relieves the deep shadow of that awful cloud of poverty which ever hangs over this rich and prosperous city.  I have been within that cloud, wet with its rain of tears, chilled with its gloomy darkness, “made free” of its innermost recesses; therefore I speak with authority when I say that even here a little child may walk and not stumble, if Jesus lead the way or hold the hand.

Nay, but children walk where strong men fall down, and young maidens enter the kingdom while yet their parents are stumbling where no light from the Golden City and “the Land very far off” reaches them.  Last winter I became very much interested in such a case.  I was going to write “Poor Mary Neil!” but that would have been the strangest misnomer.  Happy Mary Neil! rises impetuously from my heart to contradict my pen.

And yet when I first became acquainted with her condition, she was “poor” in every bitter sense of the word.

A drunkard’s eldest daughter, “the child of misery baptized with tears,” what had her seventeen years been but sad and evil ones?  Cold and hunger, cares and labors far beyond her strength sowed the seeds of early death.  For two years she struggled amid such suffering as dying lungs entail to help her mother and younger brothers and sisters, but at last she was compelled to make her bed amid sorrow and suffering which she could no longer assuage by her helpful hands and gentle words.

Her religious education had not been quite neglected, and she dimly comprehended that through the narrow valley which lay between Time and Eternity she would need a surer and more infallible guide than her own sadly precocious intellect.  Then God sent her just the help she needed—­a tender, pitiful, hopeful woman full of the love of Jesus.

Souls ripen quickly in the atmosphere of the Border Land, and very soon Mary had learned how to walk without fearing any evil.  Certain passages of Scripture burned with a supernatural glory, and made the darkness light; and there were also a few hymns which struck the finest chords in her heart, and

    “’Mid days of keenest anguish
      And nights devoid of ease,
    Filled all her soul with music
      Of wondrous melodies.”

As she neared the deeper darkness of death, this was especially remarkable of that extraordinary hymn called “The Light of Death,” by Dr. Faber.  From the first it had fascinated her.  “Has he been here that he knows just how it feels?” she asked, wonderingly, and then solemnly repeated: 

    “Saviour, what means this breadth of death,
      This space before me lying;
    These deeps where life so lingereth,
      This difficulty of dying? 
    So many turns abrupt and rude,
      Such ever-shifting grounds,
    Such strangely peopled solitudes,
      Such strangely silent sounds?’”

Her sufferings were very great, and sometimes the physical depression exerted a definable influence on her spiritual state.  Still she never lost her consciousness of the presence of her Guide and Saviour, and once, in the exhaustion of a severe paroxysm, she murmured two lines from the same grand hymn: