through the aisle,
apprehensive that some evil might accrue from her contiguity with a
"street-beggar."

But the words of the little girl had brought a new and precious
light into the boy's heart. That "cardinal explication of the
reason," the wondrous idea of the Deity, had found a voice in his
soul, and the child went forth from the church, while the
golden-winged angel followed him to the dark alley, and the darker
home; and that night, before he laid himself on his miserable pallet
in the corner, he bowed his head, and clasped his hands, and
whispered so that none might hear him, "My Father, will you take
care of me, and come and take me to yourself? for I love you." And
the angel folded his bright wings above that scanty pallet, and bent
in the silent watches of the night over the boy, and filled his
heart with peace, and his dreams with brightness.

Six months had rolled their mighty burden of life-records into the
pulseless ocean of the past. The pale stars of mid-winter were
looking down with meek, seraph glances over the mighty metropolis
along whose thousand thoroughfares lay the white carpet of the
snow-king; and Boreas, loosed from his ice caverns on the frozen
floor of the Arctic, was holding mad revels, and howling with
demoniac glee along the streets, wrapped in the pall shadows of
midnight.

Twelve o'clock pealed from the mighty tongue of the time-recorder,
and then the white-robed angel of death knocked at the door of two
young human hearts, in the great city.

The tide of golden hair flowed over the white pillows of
crimson-draperied couch. Shaded lamps poured their dim, silvery
glances upon bright flowers and circling vines, the cunning
workmanship of fingers in far-off lands, which lay among the soft
groundwork of the rich carpet, while small white fingers glided
caressingly among the golden hair; and white faces, wild with
sorrow, bent over the rigid features of the dying child, and tears,
such only as flow from the heart's deepest and bitterest fountains,
fell upon the cold forehead and paling lips, as the lids swept back
for a moment from her blue eyes, and the light from her spirit broke
for the last time into them; the lips upon which the death-seal was
ready to be laid, opened; and clear and joyous through the hushed
room rang the words, "I am coming! I am coming!" and the next moment
the cold, beautiful clay was all which was left to the mourners.

The other, at whose heart the death-a