w
the smiling child's sad history, and many a country-woman would save
a rosy-cheeked apple from out her store that autumn to bring it on
next market-day for 'Philip Hepburn's baby, as had lost its father,
bless it.'

Even stern Alice Rose was graciously inclined towards the little
Bella; and though her idea of the number of the elect was growing
narrower and narrower every day, she would have been loth to exclude
the innocent little child, that stroked her wrinkled cheeks so
softly every night in return for her blessing, from the few that
should be saved. Nay, for the child's sake, she relented towards the
mother; and strove to have Sylvia rescued from the many castaways
with fervent prayer, or, as she phrased it, 'wrestling with the
Lord'.

Alice had a sort of instinct that the little child, so tenderly
loved by, so fondly loving, the mother whose ewe-lamb she was, could
not be even in heaven without yearning for the creature she had
loved best on earth; and the old woman believed that this was the
principal reason for her prayers for Sylvia; but unconsciously to
herself, Alice Rose was touched by the filial attentions she
constantly received from the young mother, whom she believed to be
foredoomed to condemnation.

Sylvia rarely went to church or chapel, nor did she read her Bible;
for though she spoke little of her ignorance, and would fain, for
her child's sake, have remedied it now it was too late, she had lost
what little fluency of reading she had ever had, and could only make
out her words with much spelling and difficulty. So the taking her
Bible in hand would have been a mere form; though of this Alice Rose
knew nothing.

No one knew much of what was passing in Sylvia; she did not know
herself. Sometimes in the nights she would waken, crying, with a
terrible sense of desolation; every one who loved her, or whom she
had loved, had vanished out of her life; every one but her child,
who lay in her arms, warm and soft.

But then Jeremiah Foster's words came upon her; words that she had
taken for cursing at the time; and she would so gladly have had some
clue by which to penetrate the darkness of the unknown region from
whence both blessing and cursing came, and to know if she had indeed
done something which should cause her sin to be visited on that
soft, sweet, innocent darling.

If any one would teach her to read! If any one would explain to her
the hard words she heard in church or chapel, so that s