CHAPTER VIII.

Down the river.

Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn which is to see it unfold.  The delicate petals are twisted into a spiral, which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the hidden springs of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into the chamber of its virgin heart.  But the spiral must unwind by its own law, and the hand that shall try to hasten the process will only spoil the blossom which would have expanded in symmetrical beauty under the rosy fingers of morning.

We may take a hint from Nature’s handling of the flower in dealing with young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls, which, from their organization and conditions, require more careful treatment than those of their tougher-fibred brothers.  Many parents reproach themselves for not having enforced their own convictions on their children in the face of every inborn antagonism they encountered.  Let them not be too severe in their self-condemnation.  A want of judgment in this matter has sent many a young person to Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly enough if it had only been trusted to the sweet influences of morning sunshine.  In such cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not always an unalloyed evil.  It may take the place of something worse, the wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the perpetual interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and hostile to its own.  Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left to Nature in this extremity.  But before she comes to that, she has many expedients.  The mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to the starvation point.  Its experience is like that of those who have been long drifting about on rafts or in long-boats.  There is nothing out of which it will not contrive to get some sustenance.  A person of note, long held captive for a political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic explorations until he had found it.

Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would have been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence, which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not made a special provision for her mental welfare.  She was in that arid household as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain for these long years.  But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the ravens brought him, so she had the river and her secret store of books.