and the gift of
speech, beginning with a sort of crow, and ending in the "ma-ma-ma"
which the first time I heard it went prancing through and through me and
was more heavenly to my ears than the music of the spheres!

What evenings of joy I had with her!

The best of them (God forgive me!) were the nights when the bricklayer
had got into some trouble by "knocking people about" at the "Rising Sun"
and his wife had to go off to rescue him from the police.

Then, baby being "shortened," I would prop her up in her cot while I
sang "Sally" to her; or if that did not serve, and her little lip
continued to drop, I both sang and danced, spreading my skirts and
waltzing to the tune of "Clementina" while the kettle hummed over the
fire and the bricklayer's kitchen buzzed softly like a hive of bees.

Oh dear! Oh dear! I may have been down in the depths, yet there is no
place so dark that it may not be brightened by a sunbeam, and my sunbeam
was my child.

And then Martin--baby was constantly making me think of him. Devouring
her with my eyes, I caught resemblances every day--in her eyes, her
voice, her smile, and, above all, in that gurgling laugh that was like
water bubbling out of a bottle.

I used to talk to her about him, pouring all my sentimental secrets into
her ears, just as if she understood, telling her what a great man her
father had been and how he loved both of us--_would_ have done if he had
lived longer.

I dare say it was very foolish. Yet I cannot think it was all
foolishness. Many and many a time since I have wondered if the holy
saints, who knew what had really happened to Martin, were whispering all
this in my ear as a means of keeping my love for him as much alive as if
he had been constantly by my side.

The climax came when Isabel was about five months old, for then the
feeling about baby and Martin reached another and higher phase.

I hardly dare to speak of it, lest it should seem silly when it was
really so sacred and so exalted.

The idea I had had before baby was born, that she was being sent to
console me (to be a link between my lost one and me), developed into the
startling and rapturous thought that the very soul of Martin had passed
into my child.

"So Martin is not dead at all," I thought, "not really dead, because he
lives in baby."

It is impossible to say how this thought stirred me; how it filled my
heart with thankfulness; how I prayed that the little body in which the
soul of