It is a sermon on the mighty significance of little things, this
story of my first penitent. If you wish, I will tell it to you."
"Go on," said Forsythe.
The traveling men drew nearer.
"It was a night like this," repeated Father Charles, "and it was in a
great wilderness like this, only miles and miles away. I had been sent to
establish a mission; and in my cabin, that wild night, alone and with the
storm shrieking about me, I was busy at work sketching out my plans.
After a time I grew nervous. I did not smoke then, and so I had nothing
to comfort me but my thoughts; and, in spite of my efforts to make them
otherwise, they were cheerless enough. The forest grew to my door. In the
fiercer blasts I could hear the lashing of the pine-trees over my head,
and now and then an arm of one of the moaning trees would reach down and
sweep across my cabin roof with a sound that made me shudder and fear.
This wilderness fear is an oppressive and terrible thing when you are
alone at night, and the world is twisting and tearing itself outside. I
have heard the pine-trees shriek like dying women, I have heard them
wailing like lost children, I have heard them sobbing and moaning like
human souls writhing in agony--"
Father Charles paused, to peer through the window out into the black
night, where the pine-trees were sobbing and moaning now. When he turned,
Forsythe, the timber agent, whose life was a wilderness life, nodded
understandingly.
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