, and laying them down at his feet.
His great black eyes flashed with pleasure, and he gamboled about the
hearth with his new playmate in perfect forgetfulness, apparently, of
all the past night of fear and anguish.

When the great family Bible was brought out for prayers, and little Mara
composed herself on a low stool by her grandmother's side, he, however,
did not conduct himself as a babe of grace. He resisted all Miss Ruey's
efforts to make him sit down beside her, and stood staring with his
great, black, irreverent eyes during the Bible-reading, and laughed out
in the most inappropriate manner when the psalm-singing began, and
seemed disposed to mingle incoherent remarks of his own even in the
prayers.

"This is a pretty self-willed youngster," said Miss Ruey, as they rose
from the exercises, "and I shouldn't think he'd been used to religious
privileges."

"Perhaps not," said Zephaniah Pennel; "but who can say but what this
providence is a message of the Lord to us--such as Pharaoh's daughter
sent about Moses, 'Take this child, and bring him up for me'?"

"I'd like to take him, if I thought I was capable," said Mrs. Pennel,
timidly. "It seems a real providence to give Mara some company; the poor
child pines so for want of it."

"Well, then, Mary, if you say so, we will bring him up with our little
Mara," said Zephaniah, drawing the child toward him. "May the Lord bless
him!" he added, laying his great brown hands on the shining black curls
of the child.

CHAPTER IX

MOSES

Sunday morning rose clear and bright on Harpswell Bay. The whole sea was
a waveless, blue looking-glass, streaked with bands of white, and
flecked with sailing cloud-shadows from the skies above. Orr's Island,
with its blue-black spruces, its silver firs, its golden larches, its
scarlet sumachs, lay on the bosom of the deep like a great many-colored
gem on an enchanted mirror. A vague, dreamlike sense of rest and Sabbath
stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to
know that it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky
fingers; and the small tide-waves that chased each other up on the
shelly beach, or broke against projecting rocks, seemed to do it with a
chastened decorum, as if each blue-haired wave whispered to his brother,
"Be still--be still."

Yes, Sunday it was along all the beautiful shores of Maine--netted in
green and azure by its thousand islands, all glorious with their
ma