ALPHA AND OMEGA

ALPHA

Night. Silence. A struggle for the light.

And he did not know what light was. An effort to cry. And he did not know that he had a voice.

He opened his eyes "and there was light."

He had never used his eyes before, but he could see with them.

     He parted his lips and hailed this world with a cry for help.

A tiny craft in sight of new shores; he wanted his latitude and longitude. He could not tell from what port he had cleared; he did not know where he was. He had no reckoning, no chart, no pilot.

He did not know the language of the planet upon which Providence had cast him. So he saluted them in the one universal speech of God's creatures-a cry. Everybody, every one of God's children, understands that.

Nobody knew whence he came. Someone said: "He came from heaven." They did not even know the name of the little life that came throbbing out of the darkness into the light. They had only said: "If it should be a girl."

And the baby himself knew as little about it as did the learned people gathered to welcome him. He heard them speak. He had never used his ears until now, but he could hear them. “A good cry," someone said. He did not understand, but he kept on crying.

Possibly he had never entertained any conception of the world into whose citizenship he was now received, but evidently he did not like it. The noises of it were harsh to his sensitive nerves. There was a man's voice -the doctor's, strong and reassuring. And one was a mother's voice. There was none other like it. It was the first music he had heard in this world. And the sweetest.

     By and by somebody laughed softly and said, in coaxing tones:

     "There-there-there-give him his dinner."

     His face was laid close against the fount of life, warm and white and tender. Nobody told him what to do. Nobody taught him. He knew. Placed suddenly on the guest list of this changing old caravansary, he knew his way at once to two places-his bedroom and the dining-room.

He looked young, but made himself at home with the easy assurance of an old traveler. Knew the best room in the house, demanded it, and got it. Nestled into his mother's arms as though he had been measured for them.

Found that "gracious hollow that God made" in his mother's shoulder that fit his head as pillows of down never could. Cried when they took him away from it when he was a tiny baby "with no language but a cry."

Cried once again, twenty-five or thirty years after­ward, when God took it away from him. All the languages he had learned, and all the elegant phrasing the colleges had taught him, could not then voice the sorrow of his heart so well as the tears he tried to check.

Poor little baby! Had to go to school the first day he got here. He had to begin his lessons at once. Got praised when he learned them. Got punished when he missed them.

Bit his own toes and cried when he learned there was pain in this world. Studied the subject forty years before he learned how many more ways suffering can be self-inflicted.

Reached for the moon and cried because he couldn't get it. Reached for the candle and cried because he could. First lessons in mensuration. Took him fifty or sixty years of hard reading to learn why God put so many beautiful things out of our longing reach.

By and by he learned to laugh. That came later than some of the other things-much later than crying. It is a higher accomplishment. It is much harder to learn and much harder to do. He never cried unless he wished and felt just like it. But he learned to laugh many, many times when he wanted to cry.

Grew so that he could laugh with a heart so full of tears they glistened in his eyes. When people praised his laughter the most-"it was in his very eyes," they said.

Laughed, one baby day, to see the motes dance, in the sunshine. Laughed at them once again, though not quite so cheerily, many years later, when he discov­ered they were only motes.

Cried, one baby day, when he was tired of play and wanted to be lifted in the mother arms and sung to sleep. Cried again one day when his hair was white because he was tired of work and wanted to be lifted, in the arms of God and hushed to rest.

Wished half his life that he was a man. Then he turned around and wished all the rest of it that he was a boy.

Seeing, hearing, playing, working" resting, believing, suffering and loving, all his life long he kept on learning the same things he began to study when he was a baby.

OMEGA

Until at last, when he had learned all his lessons and school was out, somebody lifted him, just as they had done at first. Darkened was the room and quiet now, as it had been then. Oth.er people stood about him, very like the people who stood there at that other time.

There was a doctor now, as then; only this doctor wore a grave look and carried a book in his hand. There was a man's voice-the doctor's, strong and reassuring. There was a woman's voice, low and comforting.

The mother voice had passed into silence. But that was the one he could most distinctly hear. The others he heard, as he heard voices like them years ago. He could not then understand what they said; he did not understand them now.

He parted his lips again, but all IDS school-acquired wealth of many-syllabled eloquence, all his clear, lucid phrasing, had gone back to the old inarticulate cry.

Somebody at his bedside wept. Tears now, as then, But now they were not from his eyes.

Then someone bending over him said, "He came from heaven," Now someone, stooping above him, said, "He has gone to heaven." The blessed, unfaltering faith that welcomed him now bade him godspeed, just as loving and trusting as ever, one unchanging thing in this world of change.

So the baby had walked in a little circle after all, as all men, lost in a great wilderness, are said always to do.

As was written thousands of years ago: "The dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him in the ark."

He felt weary now, as he was tired then. By and by, having then for the first time opened his eyes, now for the last time he closed them. And so, as one who in the gathering darkness retraces his steps by a half­ remembered path, much in the same way as he had come into this world he went out of it.

Silence. Light.

R. J. Burdette.

From .. Chimes From a Jester's Bells," copyright 1897.

Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.