puts us into the world that we may try them
and be tried by them.

Poor Fanny's mother had been blocked up on the Springfield train as she
was coming on to Christmas. The old lady had been chilled through, and
was here in bed now with pneumonia. Both Fanny's children had been
ailing when she came, and this morning the doctor had pronounced it
scarlet fever. Fanny had not undressed herself since Monday, nor slept,
I thought, in the same time. So while we had been singing carols and
wishing merry Christmas, the poor child had been waiting, and hoping
that her husband or Edward, both of whom were on the tramp, would find
for her and bring to her the model nurse, who had not yet appeared. But
at midnight this unknown sister had not arrived, nor had either of the
men returned. When I rang, Fanny had hoped I was one of them.
Professional paragons, dear reader, are shy of scarlet fever. I told the
poor child that it was better as it was. I wrote a line for Sam Perry to
take to his aunt, Mrs. Masury, in which I simply said: "Dear mamma, I
have found the poor creature who wants you to-night. Come back in this
carriage." I bade him take a hack at Gates's, where they were all up
waiting for the assembly to be done at Papanti's. I sent him over to
Albany Street; and really as I sat there trying to soothe Fanny, it
seemed to me less time than it has taken to dictate this little story
about her, before Mrs. Masury rang gently, and I left them, having made
Fanny promise that she would consecrate the day, which at that moment
was born, by trusting God, by going to bed and going to sleep, knowing
that her children were in much better hands than hers. As I passed out
of the hall, the gas-light fell on a print of Correggio's Adoration,
where Woodhull had himself written years before,

"Ut appareat iis qui in tenebris et umbra mortis positi sunt."

"Darkness and the shadow of death" indeed, and what light like the light
and comfort such a woman as my Mary Masury brings!

And so, but for one of the accidents, as we call them, I should have
dropped the boys at the corner of Dover Street, and gone home with my
Christmas lesson.

But it happened, as we irreverently say,--it happened as we crossed Park
Square, so called from its being an irregular pentagon of which one of
the sides has been taken away, that I recognized a tall man, plodding
across in the snow, head down, round-shouldered, stooping forward in
walking, with his right sho