 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. The War Prayer by Mark Twain. It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms. The war was on. In heavy breast burned the holy fire of patriotism. The drums were beating. The bands playing. The toy pistols popping. The bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering. On every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies, a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun. Daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue, gay and fine, in their new uniforms. The proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts, cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by. Nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while. In the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the god of battles, beseeching his aid in our good cause and outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half-dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straight away got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. Sunday morning came, next day the battalions would leave for the front. The church was filled, the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with marshal dreams, visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender. Then home from the war, bronzed heroes welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory. With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honour, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded. A war-chapter from the Old Testament was read. The first prayer was said. It was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose with glowing eyes and beating hearts and poured out that tremendous invocation. God, the all terrible, thou who ordainest, thunder thy clarion and lightening thy sword! Then came the long prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its application was that an ever-merciful and benign father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers and aid, comfort and encourage them in their patriotic work, bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in his mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset, help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honour and glory. An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale evened gasliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way, without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag. The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside, which the startled minister did, and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes in which burned a nut and canny light, then in a deep voice he said, I come from the throne, bearing a message from Almighty God. The word smote the house with a shock if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. He has heard the prayer of his servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, his messenger, shall have explained to you its import. That is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of, except he pause and think. God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two. One uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this. Keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware. Lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it. You have heard your servant's prayer, the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it, that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God, grant that it was so. You heard these words. Grant us the victory, O Lord our God. That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into these pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory. Must follow it. Cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commanded me to put it into words. Listen. O Lord our Father, our young Patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle. Be Thou near them. With them in spirit we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells. Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their Patriot dead. Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain. Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. Help us to ring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. Help us to turn them out ruthless with little children to wander unfriended, the waste of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. Sports of the sun, flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. For our sakes who adore thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet. We ask it, in the spirit of love, of him who is the source of love, and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek his aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. Ye have prayed it. If ye still desire it, speak. The messenger of the most high waits. It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. End of The War Prayer The Water Drop by Friedrich Wilhelm Karove, adapted from the translation by Sarah Austin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Red by Carol and Francis. There once was a child who lived in a little hut, and in the hut there was nothing but a little bed and a looking-glass. But as soon as the first sunbeam glided softly through the casement and kissed his sweet eyelids, and the finch and the linnet waked him merrily with their morning songs, he arose and went out into the green meadow. And he begged flour of the primrose and sugar of the violet and butter of the buttercup. He shook dewdrops from the cow slip into the cup of the hair-bell, spray out a large lime leaf, set his breakfast upon it, and feasted daynily. And he invited a humming-beed and a gay butterfly to partake of his feast, but his favorite guest was a blue dragonfly. The bee murmured a good deal about his riches, and the butterfly told his adventures. Such talk delighted the child, and his breakfast was the sweeter to him, and the sunshine on leaf and flower seemed more bright and cheering. But when the bee had flown off to beg from flower to flower, and the butterfly had fluttered away to his play-fellows, the dragonfly still remained, poised on a blade of grass. Her slender and burnished body, more brightly and deeply blue than the deep blue sky, glistened in the sunbeam. Her net-like wings laughed at the flowers because they could not fly, but must stand still and abide the wind and rain. The dragonfly sipped a little of the child's clear dewdrops and blue violet honey, and then whispered her winged words, such stories as the dragonfly did tell. And as the child sat motionless with his blue eyes shut and his head rested on his hands, she thought he had fallen asleep. So she poised her double wings and flew into the wrestling wood. But the child had only sunk into a dream of delight and was wishing he were a sunbeam or a moonbeam, and he would have been glad to hear more and more and forever. But at last, as all was still, he opened his eyes and looked around for his dear guest, but she was flown far away. He could not bear to sit there any longer alone, and he rose and went to the gurgling brook. It gushed and rolled so merrily and tumbled so wildly along as it hurried to throw itself head over heels into the river, just as if the great, messy rock out of which it sprung were closed behind it, and could only be escaped by a breakneck leap. Then the child began to talk to the little waves and asked them once they came. They would not stay to give him an answer, but danced away one over another till at last that sweet child might not be grieved. A water drop stopped behind a piece of rock. A long time ago said the water drop, I lived with my countless sisters in the great ocean, in peace and unity. We had all sorts of pastimes. Sometimes we mounted up high into the air and peeped at the stars. Then we sank plump down deep below and looked how the coral builders work till they are tired, that they may reach the light of day at last. But I was conceited and thought myself much better than my sisters, and so one day when the sun rose out of the sea, I clung fast to one of his hot beams and thought how I should reach the stars and become one of them. But I had not ascended far when the sunbeam shook me off, and in spite of all I could say or do, let me fall into a dark cloud. And soon a flash of fire darted through the cloud, and now I thought I must surely die, but the cloud laid itself down softly upon the top of a mountain, and so I escaped. Now I thought I should remain hidden when, all on a sudden, I slipped over a round pebble, fell from one stone to another, down into the depths of the mountain. At last it was pitch dark, and I could neither see nor hear anything. Then I found, indeed, that pride goes before a fall. For, though I had already laid aside all my unhappy pride in the cloud, my punishment was to remain for some time in the heart of the mountain. After undergoing many purifications from the hidden virtues of metals and minerals, I was at length permitted to come up once more into the free and cheerful air, and to gush from this rock and journey with this happy stream. Now will I run back to my sisters in the ocean, and there wait patiently, till I am called to something better. So sent the water drop to the child, but scarcely had she finished her story when the root of a forget-me-not caught the drop and sucked her in, that she might become a floweret and twinkle brightly as a blue star on the green firmament of earth. End of The Water Drop by Friedrich Wilhelm Carovay Adapted from The Translation by Sarah Austin