e but her lonely pastimes, or gentle taskwork self-imposed
among her pastimes, and itself the sweetest of them all, inspired by a
sense of duty that still brings with it its own delight, and hallowed
by religion, that even in the most adverse lot changes slavery into
freedom--till the heart, insensible to the bonds of necessity, sings
aloud for joy. The life within the life of the "Holy Child," apart from
even such innocent employments as these, and from such recreations as
innocent, among the shadows and the sunshine of those sylvan haunts, was
passed--let us fear not to say the truth, wondrous as such worship was
in one so very young--was passed in the worship of God; and her
parents--though sometimes even saddened to see such piety in a small
creature like her, and afraid, in their exceeding love, that it
betokened an early removal from this world of one too perfectly pure
ever to be touched by its sins and sorrows--forbore, in an awful pity,
ever to remove the Bible from her knees, as she would sit with it there,
not at morning and at evening only, or all the Sabbath long, as soon as
they returned from the kirk, but often through all the hours of the
longest and sunniest weekdays, when, had she chosen to do so, there was
nothing to hinder her from going up the hill-side, or down to the little
village, to play with the other children, always too happy when she
appeared--nothing to hinder her but the voice she heard speaking in that
Book, and the hallelujahs that, at the turning over of each blessed
page, came upon the ear of the "Holy Child" from white-robed saints all
kneeling before His throne in heaven.

Her life seemed to be the same in sleep. Often at midnight, by the light
of the moon shining in upon her little bed beside theirs, her parents
leant over her face, diviner in dreams, and wept as she wept, her lips
all the while murmuring, in broken sentences of prayer, the name of Him
who died for us all. But plenteous as were her penitential
tears--penitential in the holy humbleness of her stainless spirit, over
thoughts that had never left a dimming breath on its purity, yet that
seemed in those strange visitings to be haunting her as the shadows of
sins--soon were they all dried up in the lustre of her returning smiles.
Waking, her voice in the kirk was the sweetest among many sweet, as all
the young singers, and she the youngest far, sat together by themselves,
and within the congregational music of the psalm u