What a sweet
agitation pervaded all their feelings. Then two dear heads were placed
side by side on the snowy pillows, the mother's last good-night kiss
given, and the shadowy curtains drawn.

What a pulseless stillness reigns without the chamber. Inwardly, the
parents' ears are bent. They have given those innocent ones into the
keeping of God's angels, and they can almost hear the rustle of their
garments as they gather around their sleeping babes. A sigh, deep and
tremulous, breaks on the air. Quickly the mother turns to the father
of her children, with a look of earnest inquiry upon her countenance.
And he answers thus her silent questions:--

"Far back through many years have my thoughts been wandering. At my
mother's knee thus said I nightly my childhood's evening prayer. It
was that best and holiest of all prayers, 'Our Father,' that she
taught me. Childhood and my mother passed away. I went forth as a man
into the world, strong, confident, and self-seeking. Once I came into
great temptation. Had I fallen in that temptation, I should have
fallen never to rise again. I was about yielding. All the barriers I
could oppose to it in the in-rushing flood, seemed just ready to give
way, when, as I sat in my room one evening, there came from an
adjoining chamber, now first occupied for many weeks, the murmur of
low voices. I listened. At first no articulate sound was heard, and
yet something in the tones stirred my heart with new and strong
emotions. At length there came to my ears, in the earnest, loving
voice of a woman, the words,--

"'Deliver us from evil.'

"For an instant, it seemed to me as if that voice were that of my
mother. Back with a sudden bound, through all the intervening years,
went my thoughts, and a child again I was kneeling at my mother's
knee. Humbly and reverently I said over the words of the holy prayer
she had taught me, heart and eye uplifted to heaven. The hour and
power of darkness had passed. I was no longer standing in slippery
places, with a flood of water ready to sweep me to destruction; but my
feet were on a rock. My pious mother's care had saved her son. In the
holy words she had taught me in childhood was a living power to resist
evil through all my after life. Ah! that unknown mother, as she taught
her child to repeat this evening prayer, how little dreamed she that
the holy words were to reach a stranger's ears, and save him through
the memory of his own childhood and his own mo