The Virginia enterprise. [volume] (Virginia, St. Louis County, Minn.) 1893-19??, 1904-04-29
The Resurrection.
OBSERVATION-DISCLOSURES 1lN5ITlJ5 1j5tV5JN51N7
By Mary Belle Poole Mason.

r. HE struggle was ended. She was
i dead-thank God! I alone of all
who had sung the praises of those
beautiful, star-like eyes stood there to
close down well over them the soft,
creamy lids for all time-for strange,
beautiful or horrible eternity.
Very calmly composed the slender
limbs. Those tired feet would rest
now; that weird, imaginative, tor
tured brain had ceased to fertilize or
materialize; that heart-a poets I'M
readable, joy-snatching, self-agonizing
heart whose depths so few of us can
even conceive of, much less penetrate
had ceased to beat.
Yes, the end had come-the end of
all things for her.
All, how much she had always been
denied that She had longed for!
A small, not too plentiful fed
canary, in all odd, pretty-looking cage
that hung in her window, broke sud-
denly into perfect joy-food of song.
1t, too, seemed to be thanking God
for her release. Her small room looked
so like herself with it's dainty hang
lngs of pink, and the bed, on which the
remnant of herself-that singular, at
tractive, almost wholly unknown self
lay, was white, with a delicate lace
covering
A book or two lay side by side-both
looked worn out from reading A half
finished manuscript with the pen still
In the ink lay on little table, where
also bloomed forth from a tiny pot a
purple heliotrope. A photograph of q
beautiful, silver-haired woman, her
mother, another of splendidly hand
some man in the flush of fullest youth,
with blue-gray eyes and gold-tinted
hair, and yet another of a man with
blue-gray eyes also, but with hair
turned prematurely silver-gray and a
mouth sweet as woman's, but strong
to endure and strong to deny itself
the Joy of other lips beyond his reach.
Pictures are these of two men in all
her life that she had loved. There
were dozens Of them she had admired,
airted with, laughed at, worshiped for
their culture or physical perfection.
These two she had loved.
l did not weep for her-not one
cingle tear. All, no! When the breath
suddenly stopped l bent over her, and
thrill of Joy such as I had not felt
for years permeated my very being.
She could not suffer any more; and
she had suffered so much.
l lighted the peach-blOw shaded
lamp-how well she knew the eternal
fitness of things. Everything beauti-
full appealed to her more intensely than
to anyone I ever knew.
Once she had said Tin these last and
saddest days of alD: II am sybarite,
with my intellectual and physical pal
ate always unsatisfied" I turned the
light bit higher.
How quiet the room seemed since
she had ceased to be of it and a part
of it. How she had always filled up
any place where she was, with that in
explainable force of her own personal
ity. My thoughts kept going back,
back, back, back-to beautiful man
sion, on fashionable boulevard.
There is that intense hush of ex-
pectancy. Joy, doubt, pain and hope
dwell in every breast The servants
move about noiselessly. The great
machinery of homework stands al
most still. Then the doctor comes
smiling out of a luxuriously furnished
apartment: "A)i is we'll. It is a
beautiful girl baby, weighing ten
pounds"
There is great rejoicing. And one
day the nurse brings pompously out
q long bundle of silk and lace and ger
fumed embroide-ics, and we are all
permitted to gaze upon it; for it is
topped by little brown head, a round,
creamy face and two great bits of black
velvet that dance and sparkle and
shine even then with strange, I'M
movable something that held. us al
most in a trance. A proud father
losses her up in the air and exclaims:
''Why, she's going to be the beauty of
the family. Such limbs, such eyes,
such patrician hands,"
Again the scene shifts. Reverses
have come. The mansion is gone.
see way up in the pinelands of
Mississippi little girl Of ten years
@lmping rope in county schoo,yard