"I hate God!" he said. The
wind took the words and ran away with them, among the stones, and through
the leaves of the prickly pear. He thought it died away half down the
kopje. He had told it now!
"I love Jesus Christ, but I hate God."
The wind carried away that sound as it had done the first. Then he got up
and buttoned his old coat about him. He knew he was certainly lost now; he
did not care. If half the world were to be lost, why not he too? He would
not pray for mercy any more. Better so--better to know certainly. It was
ended now. Better so.
He began scrambling down the sides of the kopje to go home.
Better so! But oh, the loneliness, the agonized pain! for that night, and
for nights on nights to come! The anguish that sleeps all day on the heart
like a heavy worm, and wakes up at night to feed!
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, "Now deal us your
hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we
suffered when we were children."
The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense
loneliness, its intense agony.
Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.
At last came the year of the great drought, the year of eighteen-sixty-two.
From end to end of the land the earth cried for water. Man and beast
turned their eyes to the pitiless sky, that like the roof of some brazen
oven arched overhead.
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