The boy looked into that fair, childish face, and his heart took courage, while very eagerly from his lips came the words, “Where is the Great Father?”

“God is in heaven!” answered the little girl in solemn tones, while a sudden gravity gathered over her features.

From lips that burned with blasphemies, amid oaths from the vile, and revilings from the scoffer, had the boy first learned that name, and never before had it possessed aught of import for him.  But now he knew it was the name of the Great Father that loved him, and again he asked very earnestly, “Where is the way to God in heaven?  I am going to Him now.”

The child shook her head as she looked on the boy with a sort of pitying wonder at his ignorance, and again she answered, “You cannot go to Him, but He will come to you if you will call upon Him, and He will hear, though you whisper very low, for God is everywhere.”

“Come, come, Miss Ellen, you must not stay here any longer,” called the servant, who had been very intent at ranging the cushions in the pew, and who now hurried her little charge through the aisle, apprehensive that some evil might accrue from her contiguity with a “street-beggar.”

But the words of the little girl had brought a new and precious light into the boy’s heart.  That “cardinal explication of the reason,” the wondrous idea of the Deity, had found a voice in his soul, and the child went forth from the church, while the golden-winged angel followed him to the dark alley, and the darker home; and that night, before he laid himself on his miserable pallet in the corner, he bowed his head, and clasped his hands, and whispered so that none might hear him, “My Father, will you take care of me, and come and take me to yourself? for I love you.”  And the angel folded his bright wings above that scanty pallet, and bent in the silent watches of the night over the boy, and filled his heart with peace, and his dreams with brightness.

Six months had rolled their mighty burden of life-records into the pulseless ocean of the past.  The pale stars of mid-winter were looking down with meek, seraph glances over the mighty metropolis along whose thousand thoroughfares lay the white carpet of the snow-king; and Boreas, loosed from his ice caverns on the frozen floor of the Arctic, was holding mad revels, and howling with demoniac glee along the streets, wrapped in the pall shadows of midnight.

Twelve o’clock pealed from the mighty tongue of the time-recorder, and then the white-robed angel of death knocked at the door of two young human hearts, in the great city.