Читать книгу The Young Pilgrim: A Tale Illustrative of "The Pilgrim's Progress" онлайн

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“Oh that we might reach it!” exclaimed Ann Dowley, the tears rising into her eyes. Her sons looked at her in wonder, for they had never known their mother utter such a sentence before. To them Mark’s enthusiasm seemed folly and madness, and they could not hide their surprise at the effect which it produced upon one so much older than themselves.

Ann Dowley had been brought up to better things, and had received an education very superior to the station in which she had been placed by her marriage. For many years she had been a servant in respectable families, and though all was now changed—how miserably changed!—she could not forget much that she had once seen and heard. She was not ignorant, though low and coarse-minded, and it was perhaps from this circumstance that her family were decidedly more intelligent than country children of their age usually are. Ann could read well, but her only stock of books consisted of some dirty novels, broken-backed and torn—she would have done well to have used them to light the fire. She was one who had never cared much for religion, who had not sought the Creator in the days of her youth; but she was unhappy now, united to a husband whom she dreaded, and could not respect—whose absence for a season was an actual relief; she was poor, and she doubly felt the sting of poverty from having once been accustomed to comfort—and Mark’s description of peace, happiness, and joy, touched a chord in her heart that had been silent for long.