ofound satisfaction therein. "Bish! bish! my
chicken," he said, as Lyndall tapped her little foot up and down upon
the floor. "Bish! bish! my chicken, you will wake him."

He moved the candle so that his own head might intervene between it
and the sleeper's face; and, smoothing his newspaper, he adjusted his
spectacles to read.

The child's grey-black eyes rested on the figure on the bed, then turned
to the German, then rested on the figure again.

"I think he is a liar. Good night, Uncle Otto," she said slowly, turning
to the door.

Long after she had gone the German folded his paper up methodically, and
put it in his pocket.

The stranger had not awakened to partake of the soup, and his son had
fallen asleep on the ground. Taking two white sheepskins from the heap
of sacks in the corner, the old man doubled them up, and lifting the
boy's head gently from the slate on which it rested, placed the skins
beneath it.

"Poor lambie, poor lambie!" he said, tenderly patting the great rough
bear-like head; "tired is he!"

He threw an overcoat across the boy's feet, and lifted the saucepan from
the fire. There was no place where the old man could comfortably lie
down himself, so he resumed his seat. Opening a much-worn Bible, he
began to read, and as he read pleasant thoughts and visions thronged on
him.

"I was a stranger, and ye took me in," he read.

He turned again to the bed where the sleeper lay.

"I was a stranger."

Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body
nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and
fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very
real to him. "Jesus, lover, and is it given to us, weak and sinful,
frail and erring, to serve Thee, to take Thee in!" he said softly, as he
rose from his seat. Full of joy, he began to pace the little room. Now
and again as he walked he sang the lines of a German hymn, or muttered
broken words of prayer. The little room was full of light. It appeared
to the German that Christ was very near him, and that at almost any
moment the thin mist of earthly darkness that clouded his human eyes
might be withdrawn, and that made manifest of which the friends at
Emmaus, beholding it, said, "It is the Lord!"

Again, and yet again, through the long hours of that night, as the
old man walked he looked up to the roof of his little room, with its
blackened rafters, and yet saw them not. His rough bea