hours during which we stood sentinels against death, and occasionally we were relieved by one or two friends.  I went on duty from about eight in the evening till one in the morning, and was then relieved by Mrs. Taylor, who remained till ten or eleven.  She then went to bed, and was replaced by little Marie.  What a change came over that child!  I was amazed at her.  All at once she seemed to have found what she was born to do.  The key had been discovered, which unlocked and revealed what there was in her, of which hitherto I had been altogether unaware.  Although she was so little, she became a perfect nurse.  Her levity disappeared; she was grave as a matron, moved about as if shod in felt, never forgot a single direction, and gave proper and womanly answers to strangers who called.  Faculties unsuspected grew almost to full height in a single day.  Never did she relax during the whole of that dreadful time, or show the slightest sign of discontent.  She sat by her mother’s side, intent, vigilant; and she had her little dinner prepared and taken up into the sickroom by Mrs. Taylor before she went to bed.  I remember once going to her cot in the night, as she lay asleep, and almost breaking my heart over her with remorse and thankfulness—­remorse, that I, with blundering stupidity, had judged her so superficially; and thankfulness, that it had pleased God to present to me so much of His own divinest grace.  Fool that I was, not to be aware that messages from Him are not to be read through the envelope in which they are enclosed.  I never should have believed, if it had not been for Marie, that any grown-up man could so love a child.  Such love, I should have said, was only possible between man and woman, or, perhaps, between man and man.  But now I doubt whether a love of that particular kind could be felt towards any grown-up human being, love so pure, so imperious, so awful.  My love to Marie was love of God Himself as He is—­an unrestrained adoration of an efflux from Him, adoration transfigured into love, because the revelation had clothed itself with a child’s form.  It was, as I say, the love of God as He is.  It was not necessary, as it so often is necessary, to qualify, to subtract, to consider the other side, to deplore the obscurity or the earthly contamination with which the Word is delivered to us.  This was the Word itself, without even consciousness on the part of the instrument selected for its vocalisation.  I may appear extravagant, but I can only put down what I felt and still feel.  I appeal, moreover, to Jesus Himself for justification.  I had seen the kingdom of God through a little child.  I, in fact, have done nothing more than beat out over a page in my own words what passed through His mind when He called a little child and set him in the midst of His disciples.  How I see the meaning of those words now! and so it is that a text will be with us for half a lifetime, recognised as great and good, but not penetrated till the experience comes round to us in which it was born.