good deed ye have done me is a treasure laid up in heaven, to be returned a
thousandfold hereafter.—And farewell, ye mine enemies, to whom it is not
permitted to harm so much as a hair of my head, nor to stay my footsteps even
for a moment. The day is coming when ye shall call upon me to witness for ye to
this one sin uncommitted, and I will rise up and answer."
She turned her steps toward the door, and the men who had stationed
themselves to guard it withdrew and suffered her to pass. A general sentiment of
pity overcame the virulence of religious hatred. Sanctified by her love and her
affliction, she went forth, and all the people gazed after her till she had
journeyed up the hill and was lost behind its brow. She went, the apostle of her
own unquiet heart, to renew the wanderings of past years. For her voice had been
already heard in many lands of Christendom, and she had pined in the cells of a
Catholic Inquisition before she felt the lash and lay in the dungeons of the
Puritans. Her mission had extended also to the followers of the Prophet, and
from them she had received the courtesy and kindness which all the contending
sects of our purer religion united to deny her. Her husband and herself had
resided many months in Turkey, where even the sultan's countenance was
gracious to them; in that pagan land, too, was Ilbrahim's birthplace, and his
Oriental name was a mark of gratitude for the good deeds of an unbeliever.
When Pearson and his wife had thus acquired all the rights over Ilbrahim that
could be delegated, their affection for him became, like the memory of their
native land or their mild sorrow for the dead, a piece of the immovable furniture
of their hearts. The boy, also, after a week or two of mental disquiet, began to
gratify his protectors by many inadvertent proofs that he considered them as
parents and their house as home. Before the winter snows were melted the
persecuted infant, the little wanderer from a remote and heathen country, seemed
native in the New England cottage and inseparable from the warmth and security
of its hearth. Under the influence of kind treatment, and in the consciousness that
he was loved, Ilbrahim's demeanor lost a premature manliness which had
resulted from his earlier situation; he became more childlike and his natural
character displayed itself with freedom. It was in many respects a beautiful one,
yet the disordered imaginations of both his father and mother had perhaps
propagated a certain unhealthiness in the mind of the boy. In his general state
Ilbrahim would derive enjoyment from the most trifling events and from every
object about him; he seemed to discover rich treasures of happiness by a faculty