selves, so that,
when the Lord should smite them, they, too, might be strong. The
missionary had long since left this field of labor and gone to another,
and his place at Diver's Bay was unfilled by a new preacher. The more
need, then, of her. Remembering her lost child, she taught the children
of others. She taught them to read and sew and knit, and, what was more
important, taught them obedience and thankfulness, and endeavored to
inspire in them some reverence and faith. The Church did not fall into
ruin there.

I wish that I might write here,--it were so easy, if it were but
true!--that Bondo Emmins came back to Diver's Bay in one of those long
years during which she was looking for him, and that he came scourged by
conscience to ask forgiveness of his diabolic vengeance.

I wish that I might write,--which were far easier, if it were but
fact,--that all the patience and courage of the Pure Heart of Diver's
Bay, all the constancy that sought to bring order and decency and
reverence into the cabins there, met at last with another external
reward than merely beholding, as the children grew up to their duties
and she drew near to death, the results of all her teaching; that those
results were attended by another, also an external reward; that the
youth, who came down like an angel to fill her place when she was gone,
had walked into her house one morning, and surprised her, as the Angel
Gabriel once surprised the world, by his glad tidings. I wish, that,
instead of kneeling down beside her grave in the sand, and vowing there,
"Oh, mother! I, who have found no mother but thee in all the world, am
here, in thy place, to strive as thou didst for the ignorant and
the helpless and unclean," he had thrown his arms around her living
presence, and vowed that vow in spite of Bondo Emmins, and all the world
beside.

But it seems that the gate is strait, and the path is ever narrow, and
the hill is difficult. And the kinds of victory are various, and the
badges of the conquerors are not all one. And the pure heart can wear
its pearl as purely, and more safely, in the heavens, where the
white array is spotless,--where the desolate heart shall be no more
forsaken,--where the BRIDEGROOM, who stands waiting the Bride, says,
"Come, for all things are now ready!"--where the SON makes glad. Pure
Pearl of Diver's Bay! not for the cheap sake of any mortal romance will
I grieve to write that He has plucked thee from the deep to reckon th