st have been her favorite too,--was,
"Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father's house are many
mansions."

The Voice in the Book seemed so tender! Somebody was speaking who had a
heart, and who knew that even a little child's heart was sometimes
troubled. And it was a Voice that called us somewhere; to the Father's
house, with its many mansions, so sunshiny and so large.

It was a beautiful vision that came to me with the words,--I could see
it best with my eyes shut,-a great, dim Door standing ajar, opening out
of rosy morning mists, overhung with swaying vines and arching boughs
that were full of birds; and from beyond the Door, the ripple of
running waters, and the sound of many happy voices, and above them all
the One Voice that was saying, "I go to prepare a place for you." The
vision gave me a sense of freedom, fearless and infinite. What was
there to be afraid of anywhere? Even we little children could see the
open door of our Father's house. We were playing around its threshold
now, and we need never wander out of sight of it. The feeling was a
vague one, but it was like a remembrance. The spacious mansions were
not far away. They were my home. I had known them, and should return to
them again.

This dim half-memory, which perhaps comes to all children, I had felt
when younger still, almost before I could walk. Sitting on the floor in
a square of sunshine made by an open window, the leaf-shadows from
great boughs outside dancing and wavering around me, I seemed to be
talking to them and they to me in unknown tongues, that left within me
an ecstasy yet unforgotten. These shadows had brought a message to me
from an unseen Somewhere, which my baby heart was to keep forever. The
wonder of that moment often returns. Shadow-traceries of bough and leaf
still seem to me like the hieroglyphics of a lost language.

The stars brought me the same feeling. I remember the surprise they
were to me, seen for the first time. One evening, just before I was put
to bed, I was taken in somebody's arms--my sister's, I think--outside
the door, and lifted up under the dark, still, clear sky, splendid with
stars, thicker and nearer earth than they have ever seemed since. All
my little being shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!" And then
the exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child,
as she was carried in, "Why, that is the roof of the house I live in."
After that I always went to sleep happier for