Daisy was very fond of the prayers always in church, but she seldom could make much of the sermon.  It was not so to-day.  In the first place, when the prayers and hymns were over, and what Daisy called “the good part” of the service was done, her astonishment and delight were about equal to see Mr. Dinwiddie come forward to speak.  It is impossible to tell how glad Daisy was; even a sermon she thought she could relish from his lips; but when he began, she forgot all about it’s being a sermon.  Mr. Dinwiddie was talking to her and to the rest of the people; that was all she knew; he was not looking down at his book, he was looking at them; his eyes were going right through hers.  And he did not speak as if he was preaching; his voice sounded exactly as it did every day out of church.  It was delightful.  Daisy forgot all about it’s being a sermon, and only drank in the words with her ears and her heart, and never took her eyes from those bright ones that every now and then looked down at her.  For Mr. Dinwiddie was telling of Him “who though he was rich yet for our sakes became poor.”  He told how rich he was, in the glories and happiness of heaven, where everything is perfect and all is his.  And then he told how Jesus made himself poor; how he left all that glory and everything that pleased him; came where everything displeased him; lived among sin and sinners; was poor, and despised, and rejected, and treated with every shame, and at last shamefully put to death and his dead body laid in the grave.  All this because he loved us; all this because he wanted to make us rich, and without his death to buy our forgiveness there was no other way.  “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Daisy forgot even Mr. Dinwiddie in thinking of that wonderful One.  She thought she had never seen before how good he is, or how beautiful; she had never felt how loving and tender Jesus is in his mercy to those that seek him, and whom he came to seek first; she never saw “the kindness and love of God our Saviour” before.  As the story went on, again and again Daisy would see a cloud or mist of tears come over the brightness of those brilliant eyes; and saw the lips tremble; and Daisy’s own eyes filled and ran over and her cheeks were wet with tears, and she never knew it!

But when Mr. Dinwiddie stopped she was so full of gladness in her little heart,—­gladness that this beautiful Saviour loved her and that she loved him, that although if she could have been sorry, she would have been very sorry that the sermon was over, she was not; she could be nothing but glad.

She thought they were going home then, after the hymn was sung; but in her thoughts she had missed some words not spoken by Mr. Dinwiddie.  And now she perceived that not only it was sacrament day, which she had seen before; but further, that the people who would not share in that service were going, and that Miss Underwood was staying, and by consequence she must stay too.  Daisy was pleased.  She had never in her life, as it happened, seen the observance of this ordinance; and she had, besides a child’s curiosity, a deep, deep interest in all that Christians are accustomed to do.  Was she not one?