AN AWAKENING AT DAWN

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 137, 11 June 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

AN AWAKENING AT DAWN

(By Klsu Fliivell, P.O. Box au, Hawera ; age 10.) "There! that's the last," said Wenda Burnley, throwing a book into her schoolcase. "Thank goodness school's over, it'ri been awful this year." "Mγ dear child," protested Marjorie, her friend, "you came first for our form, you know. What's wrong with you '!" "Oh, T don't know," Wenda sighed. "Only it's been so hard. I meant to do eo much and I've done so little. I've told myself I'd study every spare minute, but I haven't. Oh, I've been all upside down." She slammed down the lid of her case with a vicious bang. "Oh, you're all right," returned Marjorie cheerfully. "You don't need to do so much extra. You've got brains." "Oh, but I want to learn fresh things, and to really know what I learn. 1 want lo be—oh, 1 don't know," she broke off impatiently. "I'm savage with myself!'? Then she laughed. "Anyway, there are eix lovely long weeks without any school and we're going camping—what I've always longed, to do. Isn't it perfect?" "Lucky thing," said envious Marjorie. "We're going to the beach as usual. It'e all right, of course, but camping o—oh!" Six weeks .camping. A holiday of "such stuff as dreams are made of," Wenda had thought; and so it proved. Yet she found that weeks spent so happily are apt to take wings and fly; and now she realised, ae she came out of her tent in the fresh, early morning, it was the very last day of her wonderful holiday. t "I'll go for a last walk," she decided, and accordingly eet off up the hillside near. "School again in three days," she thought us she went. "AH the same old lessone, and dull old home work when I want to read. I thought I might feel moro like studying after the holidays, but I don't. I feel less like it, in fact. There's the scholarship I'll have to work for too, but I'm not likely to get it in any case." And, -despondent almost to despair, she said aloud, "Oh, what's the use?" Then she caught her breath with a little quivering gasp. She had reached the hill-top, and before, her rolled a wide expanse of beautiful epuntry, undulating into tree-filled valleys and sloping into soft curves. Far to the eastward stretched a line of low hills, and above them the sun was rising. The massed, clouds were suffused with rose and gold, and above them shone a glory of white # light, where the rays of the sun came up from below. The mists in the valleys of the hills caught the .sunlight and glinted like great fieryhearted opals. There was silence over all, not even a bird sang, it seemed ae if Nature bowed her head in reverence. Had tho world changed? It seemed so to Wendy, as she stood on the hilltop, with clasped hands and rapt eyes. "What is the use?" she whispered again, but in a different tone. "Oh, to live in a wonderful world like this, how lucky I am, how happy I should be! Oh, I feel I am not worthy of all this beauty around me! What can I do, oh, what can I do, to make myself more worthy to live in this loveiy world?" She raised her eyes to the pure white radiance above the clouds—surely the radiance and glory of God. Suddenly her tense figure trembled and tears came into her blue eyes, thoiigh there was a emile on her face. "I will! I will!" she whispered earnestly. "Oh, God, you are so good to me. I will try to do my best in the place you have given me. I feel it will be easier now." She looked, once more, upon the fair scene before her, the bright clouds, the distant hills, . the glinting mists, and all the loveliness of the landscape smiling in the morning light. The dew drops on the hillside were sparkling and flashing like thousands of precious diamonds; a tear fell down among them, but it was a tear of joy and gratitude. Then Wenda turned ajid ran back to the tent. Her heart was full of trust and hope for tie future, which stretched before her like a shining rainbow bridge to the land of success. Wenda has reached that magic country now; she found the rainbow bridge was harder to cross than it had seemed, but always, when she found a hardship in her way, she remembered a wonderful morning in. a summer holiday long tgo, when she had awakened at dawn!