She
remembered the winding-sheet, and for the first time in her life
shivered with spiritual fear. Was it hers? She asked herself, as she
sang, what sins she had committed, what life she had led, to find her
punishment so soon and in these pangs,--and then she sought eagerly for
some reason why her husband was not up and abroad to find her. He
failed her,--her one sole hope in life; and without being aware of it,
her voice forsook the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting
hymns,--hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the
class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners,--grand and sweet Methodist
hymns, brimming with melody and with all fantastic involutions of tune
to suit that ecstatic worship,--hymns full of the beauty of holiness,
steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent to those
in worse extremity than hers,--for they had found themselves in the
grasp of hell, while she was but in the jaws of death. Out of this
strange music, peculiar to one character of faith, and than which there
is none more beautiful in its degree nor owning a more potent sway of
sound, her voice soared into the glorified chants of churches. What to
her was death by cold or famine or wild beasts? "Though He slay me, yet
will I trust in Him," she sang.
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