"
"Ah, you are from my part of the country," said the lad joyfully, trying
to raise himself, but sinking back exhausted. "I know it in your voice,
it's just music to me. How good God has been to me!"
They were all too much touched by his words to answer him, and Eva could
only bend over him and smooth his brow.
"Now mother will have some one to tell her about me," he added, turning
to Mrs. Cameron, and grasping her hand. Then, as strength came back in
some measure to the wasted frame, he went on in broken sentences to tell
how he had been clerk in a big mercantile house in Hobart, how he had
been invalided and lying in the hospital there for weeks. "But I have
saved money," he added joyfully, "she need not feel herself a burden on
my sister any more; my sister is married to a poor Scotch minister, and
she lives with them, or was to, till I came home. Now that will never
be. Oh, if I could just have seen her!"
"But you will see her again, laddie," said the old man. "Remember our
own dear poet Bonar's words:
"Where the child shall find his mother,
Where the mother finds the child,
Where dear families shall gather
That were scattered o'er the wild;
Brother, we shall meet and rest
'Mid the holy and the blest."
"Thank you," said the dying lad. "I think I could sleep." His eyes were
closing, when a harsh loud voice with a foreign accent was heard near.
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