“What are you making?” he asked, and went up to her.

The little girl had got through with her parish long before that; in fact, she had already pulled it down and started something new.

“If you had only come a minute sooner!” exclaimed the child.  “I had made such a beautiful parish, with both church and schoolhouse—­”

“But where is it now?”

“Oh, I’ve destroyed the parish, and now I’m building a Jerusalem, and—­”

“What?” interrupted the parson.  “Have you destroyed the parish in order to build a Jerusalem?”

“Yes,” said Gertrude, “and it was such a fine parish!  But we read about Jerusalem yesterday in school, and now I have pulled down the parish to build a Jerusalem.”

The preacher stood regarding the child.  He put his hand to his forehead and thought a moment, then he said:  “It is surely someone greater than you that speaks through your mouth.”

The child’s words seemed to him so extraordinarily prophetic that he kept repeating them to himself, over and over.  Gradually his thoughts drifted back into their old groove, and he began to ponder the ways of Providence and the means by which He works His will.

Presently he went back to the schoolmaster, his eyes shining with a new light, and said in his usual cheery tone: 

“I’m no longer angry at you, Storm.  You are only doing what you must do.  All my life I have been pondering the ways of Providence, and I can’t seem to get any light on them.  Nor do I understand this thing, but I understand that you are doing what you needs must do.”

“And they saw heaven open”

The spring the mission house was built there was a great thaw, and the Dal River rose to an alarming height.  And what quantities of water that spring brought!  It came in showers from the skies; it came rushing down in streams from the mountainsides, and it welled out of the earth; water ran in every wheel rut and in every furrow.  All this water found its way to the river, which kept rising higher and higher, and rolled onward with greater and greater force.  It did not present its usual shiny and placid appearance, but had turned a dirty brown from all the muddy water that kept flowing in.  The surging stream, filled with logs and cakes of ice, looked strangely weird and threatening.

At first the grown folks paid no special heed to the spring flood; only the children ran down to the banks to watch the raging river and all that it carried along.

But timber and ice floes were not the only things that went floating by!  Presently the stream came driving with washing piers and bath houses, then with boats and wreckage of bridges.

“It will soon be taking our bridge, too!” the children exclaimed.  They felt a bit uneasy, but were glad at the same time that something so extraordinary was likely to happen.

Suddenly a huge pine, root and branch, came sailing past, followed by a white-stemmed aspen tree, its spreading branches thick with buds which had swelled from being so long in the water.  Close upon the trees came a little hay shed, bottom upward; it was still full of hay and straw, and floated on its roof like a boat on its keel.