re's your generosity and your
patience? Did we not all promise to think of papa and mamma before
ourselves--yes, and of our poor Maria, too, who is so ill?"

"That is true," replied the boy, "but when I promised that, I wasn't so
hungry as I am now. But, still, if I had anything to eat, I would
give the best part of it to papa or mamma, or Maria, if she could eat
it--that is, after I had taken one mouthful for myself. Oh will Ned
never come from the post-office?"

"Mamma," said the sick girl, looking up into her mother's eyes, "I
am sustained by one hope, and that is, that I will soon cease to be a
burthen upon dear papa--my heartbroken papa and you. I am anxious to
pass away to that blessed place where all tears shall be wiped from my
eyes;" and as she spoke she raised herself a little, and quietly wiped
one or two from them; and, she proceeded, "where the weary will be at
rest. Alas! how little did we expect or imagine this great weight of
suffering!"

"My darling child," said her mother, kissing her pale cheek, and
pressing her more tenderly to her bosom, "you have ever been more
solicitous for the comfort and well-being of others than you have been
for your own; yet, well and dearly as we love you, how can we grudge you
to God? It was He who gave you to us--it is He who is taking you from
us; and what can we say, but blessed be His name?"

"My children," said the old man, "what would life be if there were
nothing to awaken us to a sense of our responsibilities to our Creator?
If it presented to us nothing but one unshaken path of pleasure and
ease--one equal round of careless enjoyment and indolent apathy? Alas!
my darlings, do not we, who are aged and have experience, know that it
is those who are not taken by calamity and suffering who gradually fall
into that hardness of heart, which prevents the spirit from feeling one
of the most wholesome of truths--that indifference is danger, and that a
neglect of the things which belong to a better life, and which serve
to prepare us for it, is the great omission of those who are not
called upon to suffer. You know, my children, that whom God loveth He
chasteneth, and it is true. To those whom He graciously visits with
affliction, it may be said that He communicates, from time to time,
a new revelation of Himself; for it is by such severe but wholesome
manifestations that He speaks to and arouses the forgetful or the
alienated heart. Our calamity, however, and suffering