THE HOME CIRCLE | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 18, 1878

THE HOME CIRCLE.

Ever So Slight a Blow.

Just before leaving for my home I was standing at a window watching the play of Edith and a large dog; I thought I had never seen a child so beautiful. Her motions had about them a nameless grace that charmed one. The drooping of the white lids over the brown eyes; the sweetness of the rosy mouth. Surely, I thought, with such powers for winning love, and your own kind heart, life promises its best gifts for you, sweet child! Sad, that parental hands should crush the brightness of that young life!

Fifteen years had wheeled their swift circle since we three had met, and now how changed! Lines of grief are deeply graven on the mother's face, and the piteous love looking from her eyes drew tears to my own, whenever any one, forgetting her misfortune, addressed her child, the Edith whose fair childhood had been more than realized in the beautiful girl, who never more would hear the sound of a human voice.

They had been to see a celebrated physician, who gave them no hope, saying, "The hearing was entirely gone, caused by a blow or continued blows upon the head." "And when he asked me," said the mother, "if, during childhood, she had not had her ears boxed often, and that had caused her deafness, reason trembled, and I could but cry, 'my punishment is greater than I can bear.'"

"You who love your children know how much I have suffered when the knowledge of this calamity befell my beautiful child. But, oh, Mary! may God pity you if you ever feel the agony of learning that it was placed there by your own hands? Why were they not paralyzed or withered in the grave, and this dreadful thing not have been," she cried.

But I must shut my eyes upon this painful picture. Were my pen capable of showing the agony of the stricken mother, never more would the mothers who read these lines strike the tender head of the little child ever so slight a blow. — Home Guardian.