ed,
Elizabeth could do no other but, in her measure, to glorify
him too. She did not doubt, but she hesitated, and trembled.
The song of the birds and the flow of the water mocked her
hesitancy and difficulty. But Elizabeth was honest; and though
she trembled she would not and could not disobey the voice of
conscience which set before her one clear, plain duty. She was
in great doubt whether to stand or to kneel; she was afraid of
being seen if she knelt; she would not be so irreverent as to
pray sitting; she rose to her feet, and clasping a cedar tree
with her arms, she leaned her head beside the trunk, and
whispered her prayer, to him who saves his people from their
sins, that he would make her one of them, she did not know
how, she confessed; she prayed that he would teach her.

She kept her position and did not move her bended head, till
the tears which had gathered were fallen or dried; then she
sat down and took up her book again and looked down into the
water. What had she done? Entered a pledge, she felt, to be
what she had prayed to be; else her prayer would be but a
mockery, and Elizabeth was in earnest. "What a full-grown fair
specimen he is of his class," she thought, her mind recurring
again to her adviser and exemplar; "and I -- a poor ignorant
thing in the dark, groping for a bit of light to begin!" -- The
tears gathered again; she opened the second chapter of
Matthew.

She looked off again to feel glad. Was a pledge entered only
on her side? -- was there not an assurance given somewhere, by
lips that cannot lie, that prayer earnestly offered should not
be in vain? She could not recall the words, but she was sure of
the thing; and there was more than one throb of pleasure, and
a tiny shoot of grateful feeling in her heart, before
Elizabeth went back to her book. What was the next
'obligation'? She was all ready for it.

Nothing stopped her much in the second chapter. The 'next
obligation' did not start up till the words of John the
Baptist in the beginning of the third --

"Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

"What is repentance? -- and what is the kingdom of heaven?"
pondered Elizabeth. "I wish somebody was here to tell me.
Repent? -- I know what it is to repent -- it is to change one's
mind about something, and to will just against what one willed
before. -- And what ought I to repent about? -- Everything
wrong! _Everything wrong!_ -- That is, to turn about and set my
face