“I have heard you say that so often,” replied Flemming, laughing, “that I begin to believe it is true.  But I wonder if Care shaved his left eyebrow, after doing the deed, as the ancient Egyptians used to do!”

“Aha! now you are sweeping cobwebs from the sky!  Good night!  Good night!”

A sorrowful event happened in the neighbourhood that night.  The widow’s child died suddenly.  “Woe is me!”—­thus mourns the childless mother in one of the funeral songs of Greenland; “Woe is me, that I should gaze upon thy place and find it vacant!  In vain for thee thy mother dries the sea-drenched garments!” Not in these words, but in thoughts like these, did the poor mother bewail the death of her child, thinking mostly of the vacant place, and the daily cares and solicitudes of maternal love.  Flemming saw a light in her chamber, and shadows moving toand fro, as he stood by the window, gazing into the starry, silent sky.  But he little thought of the awful domestic tragedy, which was even then enacted behind those thin curtains!

CHAPTER VIII.  FOOT-PRINTS OF ANGELS.

It was Sunday morning; and the church bells were all ringing together.  From all the neighbouring villages, came the solemn, joyful sounds, floating through the sunny air, mellow and faint and low,—­all mingling into one harmonious chime, like the sound of some distant organ in heaven.  Anon they ceased; and the woods, and the clouds, and the whole village, and the very air itself seemed to pray, so silent was it everywhere.

Two venerable old men,—­high priests and patriarchs were they in the land,—­went up the pulpit stairs, as Moses and Aaron went up Mount Hor, in the sight of all the congregation,—­for the pulpit stairs were in front, and very high.

Paul Flemming will never forget the sermon he heard that day,—­no, not even if he should live to be as old as he who preached it.  The text was, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”  It was meant to console the pious, poor widow, who sat right below him at the foot of the pulpit stairs, all in black, and her heart breaking.  He said nothing of the terrors of death, nor of the gloom of the narrow house, but, looking beyond these things, as mere circumstances to which the imagination mainly gives importance, he told his hearers of the innocence of childhood upon earth, and the holiness of childhood in heaven, and how the beautiful Lord Jesus was once a little child, and now in heaven the spirits of little children walked with him, and gathered flowers in the fields of Paradise.  Good old man!  In behalf of humanity, I thank thee for these benignant words!  And, still more than I, the bereaved mother thanked thee, and from that hour, though she wept in secret for her child, yet

“She knew he was with Jesus,

And she asked him not again.”