“But I would like to tell you, sir.  Would you believe it, sir, I wished ’em dead?  Just to get the wailin’ of them out o’ my head, I wished ’em dead.  In the courtyard o’ the squire’s house, where my Tomkins worked on the home-farm, there was an old draw-well.  It wasn’t used, and there was a lid to it, with a hole in it, through which you could put a good big stone.  And Tomkins once took me to it, and, without tellin’ me what it was, he put a stone in, and told me to hearken.  And I hearkened, but I heard nothing,—­as I told him so.  ‘But,’ says he, ‘hearken, lass.’  And in a little while there come a blast o’ noise like from somewheres.  ‘What’s that, Tomkins?’ I said.  ‘That’s the ston’,’ says he, ‘a strikin’ on the water down that there well.’  And I turned sick at the thought of it.  And it’s down there that I wished the darlin’s that God had sent me; for there they’d be quiet.”

“Mothers are often a little out of their minds at such times, Mrs Tomkins.  And so were you.”

“I don’t know, sir.  But I must tell you another thing.  The Sunday afore that, the parson had been preachin’ about ’Suffer little children,’ you know, sir, ‘to come unto me.’  I suppose that was what put it in my head; but I fell asleep wi’ nothin’ else in my head but the cries o’ the infants and the sound o’ the ston’ in the draw-well.  And I dreamed that I had one o’ them under each arm, cryin’ dreadful, and was walkin’ across the court the way to the draw-well; when all at once a man come up to me and held out his two hands, and said, ‘Gie me my childer.’  And I was in a terrible fear.  And I gave him first one and then the t’other, and he took them, and one laid its head on one shoulder of him, and t’other upon t’other, and they stopped their cryin’, and fell fast asleep; and away he walked wi’ them into the dark, and I saw him no more.  And then I awoke cryin’, I didn’t know why.  And I took my twins to me, and my breasts was full, if ye ’ll excuse me, sir.  And my heart was as full o’ love to them.  And they hardly cried worth mentionin’ again.  But afore they was two year old, they both died o’ the brown chytis, sir.  And I think that He took them.”

“He did take them, Mrs Tomkins; and you’ll see them again soon.”

“But, if He never forgets anything——­”

“I didn’t say that.  I think He can do what He pleases.  And if He pleases to forget anything, then He can forget it.  And I think that is what He does with our sins—­that is, after He has got them away from us, once we are clean from them altogether.  It would be a dreadful thing if He forgot them before that, and left them sticking fast to us and defiling us.  How then should we ever be made clean?—­What else does the prophet Isaiah mean when he says, ’Thou hast cast my sins behind Thy back?’ Is not that where He does not choose to see them any more?  They are not pleasant to Him to think of any more than to us.  It is as if He said—­’I will not think of that any more, for my sister will never do it again,’ and so He throws it behind His back.”