his place, and leaned her ear to the unbreathing
mouth, long deluding herself with its lifelike smile; but a sudden
darkness in the room, and a sudden stillness, most dreadful both,
convinced their unbelieving hearts at last, that it was death.

All the parish, it may be said, attended her funeral--for none stayed
away from the kirk that Sabbath--though many a voice was unable to join
in the Psalm. The little grave was soon filled up--and you hardly knew
that the turf had been disturbed beneath which she lay. The afternoon
service consisted but of a prayer--for he who ministered had loved her
with love unspeakable--and, though an old grey-haired man, all the time
he prayed he wept. In the sobbing kirk her parents were sitting, but no
one looked at them--and when the congregation rose to go, there they
remained sitting--and an hour afterwards, came out again into the open
air, and parting with their pastor at the gate, walked away to their
hut, overshadowed with the blessing of a thousand prayers.

And did her parents, soon after she was buried, die of broken hearts, or
pine away disconsolately to their graves? Think not that they, who were
Christians indeed, could be guilty of such ingratitude. "The Lord
giveth, and the Lord taketh away--blessed be the name of the Lord!" were
the first words they had spoke by that bedside; during many, many long
years of weal or woe, duly every morning and night, these same blessed
words did they utter when on their knees together in prayer--and many a
thousand times besides, when they were apart, she in her silent hut, and
he on the hill--neither of them unhappy in their solitude, though never
again, perhaps, was his countenance so cheerful as of yore--and though
often suddenly amidst mirth or sunshine their eyes were seen to
overflow. Happy had they been--as we mortal beings ever can be
happy--during many pleasant years of wedded life before she had been
born. And happy were they--on to the verge of old age--long after she
had here ceased to be. Their Bible had indeed been an idle Book--the
Bible that belonged to "the Holy Child,"--and idle all their kirk-goings
with "the Holy Child," through the Sabbath-calm--had those intermediate
years not left a power of bliss behind them triumphant over death and
the grave.

OUR PARISH.

Nature must be bleak and barren indeed to possess no power over the
young spirit daily expanding on her breast into new susceptibilities,
that ere l