Cornwall suddenly
became a new Holy Land to the girl. Here the circumstances of life chimed
with those recorded in the New Testament, and it was an easy mental
achievement to transplant her Saviour from a historical environment into
her own. She pictured Him as walking amid Uncle Chirgwin's ripening corn;
she saw Him place His hands on the heads of the little children at cottage
doors; she imagined Him standing upon one of the stranded luggers in Newlyn
harbor with the gulls floating round His head and the fishermen listening
to his utterance.
The growing mother instincts in Joan also developed about this season. They
leaped from comparative quiescence into activity; they may indeed be
recorded as having arisen within her after a manner not less sudden than
had the new faith itself, which was exhibited to you as blossoming with an
abruptness almost violent, because it thus occurred. Now most channels of
thought led Joan to her unborn infant, and there came at length an occasion
upon which she prayed for the first time that her child might be justified
in its existence.
The petition was raised where, in the past, she had uttered one widely
different: at the altar-stone in the ruined baptistery of Saint Madron.
Thither on a day in early August, Joan traveled by short cuts over fields
which brought the chapel within reach of Drift. The scene had changed from
that of her former visit, and summer was keeping the promises of spring.
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