I asked these questions of Anna Percival, the while she stood at an upper window, and looked out over New York’s surging lines of life.  The roar of rolling wheels came muffled by distance and the shore of dwelling-places over which I looked.  I counted the church-spires that threaded the vault of night a little of the upward way.  How angels, that have lived forever in heaven, and souls just free from material things, must reach down to touch these towering masts, that tell which way the sails of spirit bend!  These city churches, dedicated with solemn service unto the worship of the great I AM, the Lord God of Adam, the Jehovah Jireh of Israelites, the Holy Redeemer of Christians,—­may the Lord of heaven and earth bless them every one!  I looked forth upon them with tears.  There never comes a time, in the busiest hurry of human ways, that I do not sprinkle a drop of love upon the steps as I pass,—­that I do not wind a tendril of holy feeling up to height of tower or summit of spire for the great winds to waft onward and upward.  God pity the heart that does not involuntary reverence to God’s templed places, made sacred a thousand fold by every penitential tear, by every throb of devotion, by every aspiration after the divine existence, from which let down a little while, we wander, for what we know not!  God doth not tell, save that it is to “love first Him, Sole and Individual,” and then the fragments, the crumbs of Divinity that dwell in Man.

I had not lighted the gas.  The street-lamps sent up their rays, making the room semi-lucent.  I took out my tower-key.  What matter, if I held the cold iron thereof to my lips awhile? there was no frost in the March air then.  I sent my restless fingers in and out of the wards, prisoning them often therein.  As thus I stood, with cheek pressed against the windowpane, looking out upon the city, set into a rim of darkness, from out of which it flashed its million rays, papa came up.

“I didn’t say good-night,” he said, coming in, and to the window where I was.  “But how is this, Anna? what has happened to my child? “—­and he pointed to shining drops that glistened on the window-glass.

They must have come from my eyes; I could not deny their authorship, and so I confessed to tears of gladness at seeing him once more.

He looked fondly down at me through the dim light.  I asked him after the tenant of my premises.  He shook his head as one does in great doubt, said “life was uncertain,” and repeated several other axioms, that were quite apart from his original style, and excessively annoying to me.

“Papa,” I said, “why not tell me truly? will this man recover?”

“‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ my child,” he said.

“I don’t dispute the general truth,” I replied,—­“but, particularly, is this man’s life in danger?”

He began to quote somebody’s psalm or hymn about “fitful fevers and fleeting shadows.”

My father has a fine, rich, variant power of sound with which to charm such as have ears to hear, and Anna Percival has been so endowed.  Therefore she listened and waited to the end.  When it came, she looked up into her father’s face and said,—­