“Mountain, green mountain, Ahoy! 
    My heart is hurting, sadly I cry! 
  Painful, so painful is my woe,
    My heart is fainting, my joy is gone.”

“Forgive me, Peter,” suddenly said Stephen Slavkovsky.  “It was not right that I hid myself from you.  I have caused you much sorrow.  While I imagined that you were living with Eva in our mountains, which I never could forget, perhaps surrounded with children, and our parents were happy with you—­you have lived alone for years.  It was not good that I did not let you know about myself.  Once some one from this neighborhood came to America but did not know me and told me that father died.  I had already written a letter to mother, to send her my love, but I did not send it.  I thought how good I was to you, but that heart of ours is deceitful and perverse, full of self-righteousness and pride.  I have done wrong both to mother and to you, but I was repaid when my only child forsook me, and after ten years I must come as far as here to find her.”

Bacha roused himself, “Come, Stephen, let us delay no longer; but if we go on foot we shall arrive very late.”

They both arose.  “I am on foot.  I have a coach; however, I told the driver to feed the horses a bit.  Now I hear them; they will be ready.  Let us go; on the way we can tell one another more.”

Thus among the Slovak mountains rode two brothers, who had grown up among them, and were so closely united to them, that one of them in a distant land almost died of home-sickness, and the other could not have lived without them at all.  Now they did not think about the beauty around them, because Stephen Slavkovsky found out his child was waiting for him, and that only the Heavenly Doctor could save His sheep which had returned to Him.

The proverb says that bad luck does not wander among the mountains but among the people.  Now it was among the mountains.  Who can describe the moment when the father stopped at the bed of his only child and saw her so broken and read on her beautiful face the confirmation of all of which he had once warned her.  The setting sun shone upon the broken flower and on the man who was kneeling at her bed, his head laid on his crossed arms.  No one dared to disturb him in his sadness and prayer.  Suddenly the lady opened her eyes; she turned them to the window and began to sing softly the song which she had recently taught the boys: 

  “Jesus, Lover of my soul,
    Let me to Thy bosom fly,
  While the billows o’er me roll,
    While the tempest still is high;
  Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,
    Till the storm of life be past;
  Safe into the haven guide;
    Oh, receive my soul at last.”

Her father cried silently and the others with him.  But she sang on, and as Joe said sometime ago, “She could do anything with them when she sang.”  The weeping stopped, and the small room seemed to be full of the presence of Him who is the King of Glory, the Prince of Peace, and the only Healer.