A Few Short Sketches | Page 8

their many possessions. Anyhow,
they left their mansion on the hill-top, and it was sold to an institution
of learning, and the grounds were divided and subdivided into lots. The
mother never recovered. After an illness of several years she died
suddenly at some winter resort, with the old name of Basil on her lips
that formed the word and then were forever still. Rose and Grace could
look upon those familiar features and behold the trace of beauty which
time and disease had tenderly spared. But Mary, the third daughter,
blind from her birth, could only feel the face of her beloved and kiss the
lips that could no longer speak her name. Blind! and without a mother,
even if she had been foolish for her years, and had, in an hour of human
weakness, yielded to a love which was useless, out of the question,
unnatural. She was twelve, yet the little blind maid was old enough to
know her loss, to feel her sorrow.
Rose, cold, selfish, unsympathetic, lamenting the loss of a lover whom
she had no power to hold more than the death of her mother, feeling no
love for the sister who had made for her sake a useless sacrifice, was
not a desirable companion for the little blind sister.
Grace, upon whom the care of the child had fallen these latter years,
and who had been faithful and loving to her charge, had begun to put
worldly things from her, and when that long-expected but sudden death
came upon them, she resolved, after much meditation and prayer, to
enter some holy order and lead a life dedicated to the Master.
Clad in the robes of a Carmelite nun, she may have been too unmindful
of the little blind one who had clung to her and plead with her not to
leave her alone with Rose. For after all, what is raiment even if it be
fine, aye, purple and fine linen; what is food, even if it be dainty like
the ambrosia of the Gods; what is warmth, what is comfort, what are all

these things if the heart be cold, naked and hungry? Grace had provided
for her bodily comforts, but she had failed to fill her own place left
vacant with some heart that would be kind and loving to Mary, blind
and helpless.
After Grace entered the Carmelite Convent, which was many miles
away from their old home, Rose and Mary returned to the big smoky
city, and were swallowed up in the multitude of people who exist in
buildings and houses, where men and women huddle together and have,
as they had, a certain amount of comfort, but lose their identity, and are
finally swept away into that great stagnant pool of obscurity where
existence in great cities goes on and on without either ebb or flow.
The little blind maid was lonely and sick at heart. The noise and the cry
of the street smote her to the earth. The people in the house where they
lived, were as kind as they knew how to be; but how little they knew
about kindness, and nothing about peace and quiet. She felt that she
was a burden to Rose, and she knew that Rose could never be any thing
to her. Those poor, sightless eyes shed tears of homesickness for Grace,
and she was sorely oppressed with the desire to be with her again and
feel the touch of those cool, quiet hands against her face and over her
eyelids that so often burned with pain, and to hear that voice, which
was never loud and harsh. But what could she do? This is what she did:
With her own hand, unaided, she wrote a letter to the Pope at Rome,
and gave it with a piece of silver to an honest house-maid, who carried
it to her priest for proper direction, which he wrote upon it, marveling
much when he read her earnest words of entreaty, begging the Pope to
please send back her Sister Grace from the convent, because she was a
little girl, "blind, helpless and very lonely."
The Pope may be infallible, but he is surely human, for when he read
the simple words sprawled out upon a sheet of paper, blistered with the
tears of the little blind maid crying out from across the seas her appeal
for the return of her sister from those convent walls, he was moved to a
compassion which was not only priestly, but very human. He bestirred
himself in her behalf. He wrote letters to the convent of those Carmelite
nuns. He made earnest inquiry about Grace, and finally, after many

days of weary, heart-sick waiting, a letter came to the parish priest for
little Mary. It was written by