Could it be that she remembered the passage aright?  Her Bible lay open on the table before her.  She had that morning earnestly sought strength from it, and from communion with God before she could nerve herself to meet her children, and bear their reiterated salutations, heart-rending to her, “Happy New Year, mother”—­“Mother, dear mother, I wish you a Happy New Year.”

Now as she drew it towards her, and turned over its pages to verify the exactness of the words, it soon opened to the blessed thirty-fourth psalm, which has proved to many an anchor of hope when they cried to God “out of the depths.”

“I will bless the Lord at all times;” Oh, surely not!—­How could any one bless the Lord at such a time as this?  Yet there it stood:—­

“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.”  If others could do this, and had done it, God helping her, she would do it too.  She, too, would bless the Lord, and speak his praises.

“My soul shall make her boast in the Lord.”  A feeling of exultation began to rise within her.  Something was yet left to her.  Her earthly “boast” was indeed broken; but why might not she, too, “make her boast in the Lord”?

Touched with living light, verse by verse stood out before her, as written by the finger of a present God.  Humbled to the earth, overpowered by deep self-abasement and contrition of soul, she clung as with a death-grasp to the words that were bearing her triumphantly through these dark waves.

“They looked unto Him and were lightened.”  Was not her darkness already broken as by a beam from His face?

“This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his troubles.”

“The angel of the Lord encampeth about them that fear Him, and delivereth them.”

“The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears are open unto their cry.”

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.”

Who was this, that, under these comfortable words, looked peacefully upward?  It was one who was learning to trust God; taught it, as most of us are, by being placed in circumstances where there is nothing else to trust.

It is not for us to portray all that passes in the human soul when it is brought into vivid communion with its Maker.  It is enough for us to know that this sorrowful heart was made to exult in God, even in the calm consciousness of its irretrievable loss; and that before the sun of a day specially consecrated to grief had attained its meridian, the mourner came cheerfully forth from her place of retirement, while a chant, as of angelic voices, breathed through the temple of her sorrowful soul, even over its broken altar.

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.”