The Atlantic Monthly, page 29 by Various Authors
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hat force it could have been conducted that bright morning to the feet of Love. It was "a day of days."
To the trophy of Deane this scene must have been strangely new. No doubt, he had before now sat in a church, a decorated church, a church where music had much to do with the service. But never under such circumstances had he stood, sat, knelt, taking part in the worship, a man among men. Of this Mr. Deane was thinking; and his brain, not very imaginative, was taxed to conceive the conception of freedom a man must obtain under precisely these circumstances.
But the man in question was thinking thoughts as widely diverse from these attributed to him as one could easily imagine. Of himself, and his position, scarcely at all. And when he thought, he smiled; but the gravity, the abstraction into which he repeatedly lapsed, seemed to say for him that freedom was to him more than he knew what to do with. No volubility of joy, no laughter, no manifested exultation in deliverance from bondage: 't was a rare case; must one believe his eyes?
Probably the constraint of habit was upon the fugitive, the contraband. Homesickness in spite of him, it might be. Oh, surely freedom was not bare to him as a winter-rifled tree? Not a bud of promise swelling along the dreary waste of tortuous branches? Possibly some ties had been ruptured in making his escape, which must be knit again before he could enter into the joy he had so fairly won. For you and me it would hardly be perfect happiness to feast at great men's tables, while the faces we love best, the dear, the sacred faces, grow gaunt from starvation.
Mr. Deane took to himself some glory in consequence of his late achievements. He was a practical man, and his theories were now being put to a test that gave him some proud satisfaction. The attitude he assumed not many hours ago in reference to the organist has added to his consciousness of weight, and to-day he has taken as little pleasure as became him in the choir's performance. Now and then