Sunshine, Daylight, And The Rock

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Title:     Sunshine, Daylight, And The Rock
Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles [More Titles by Charles]

Sunshine and Daylight had one day a serious difference of opinion about a rocky waste, over which their course led them.

"I am not severe," said Daylight, fixing her clear, generalizing gray eyes on the Rock. "If I cannot, like some people, see nothing but what I wish to see, no one ever accused me of blackening any one's character. I have known that old Rock more years than I care to mention; not a jagged edge nor a whimsical cranny but I am intimately acquainted with; and I do not hesitate to say, that a more barren, unmitigated rock I seldom meet with. I do not slander it. I only say, it is nothing more or less than a rock."

Sunshine said nothing, but peeped round the shoulder of her cousin's gray cloak, until the smile of her soft eye met the eye of a little blue violet, which, by dint of hard living, had contrived to obtain a secure footing in a crevice of the old rock; and a flutter of joy passed through the blossoms and leaves of the violet, and communicated itself to a tuft of dry short grass, which had ensconced itself behind. The red and gray cups of some tiny moss and lichens, which had crept into corners here and there, next drank in her kind glances, and fancied themselves wine-cups at a feast. Here and there specks of colour and points of life revealed themselves, and, as they looked, expanded.

By this time Sunshine had folded Daylight to sleep on her warm breast. Many weeks had passed, when, one quiet afternoon, Daylight again came that way, and glancing critically around, she murmured to Sunshine, "Where is the old gray Rock you were so sanguine about?"

Sunshine was silent; her motto being, "Not in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth;" and at length Daylight's quiet eyes awoke to the fact, that the grassy knoll where flowers--tiny rock-plants indeed, but still flowers--and mosses lay dozing, unawakened by her sober tread, was none other than the Rock she had known of old. And she said meekly, "Truly I find that one way to create beauty is to perceive it."

Then an angel, who was hovering near, on his way back from some message of mercy (for the angels never linger till their messages are given), sang softly, "Love veileth a multitude of sins." And the old Rock answered in a chorus, through its moss-threads, and lichen-cups, and leaves, and blossoms, "And under the warm veil spring a multitude of flowers."

[The end]
Elizabeth Rundle Charles's short story: Sunshine, Daylight, And The Rock

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