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themselves and unassisted the broken-hearted parents laid out the little corpse, and then returned sadly to keep their night-watch beside the exhausted form of his brother. The fever had quite left him; he looked wan, and shivered slightly, as if he felt the icy fingers of death laid upon him, and shrunk from their first cold touch. He had scarcely spoken since he was taken ill, but now he slowly opened his still beautiful eyes. "Oh Lizzie, Lizzie, how lovely you are! do come into my arms, my own, my darling Lizzie," and he opened wide his arms, as if about to embrace and hold fast something, but the effort was too much for him, and they fell powerless at his side. It was twilight fast growing into dusk, when he again spoke. "Father-mother-are you there? thought I had got Lizzie-wings-brightnesswhere am I? Oh mother, the place is all bright and shiny-see, the light is coming upon everything, now it is shining on you. Look-can't you see it, mother ?" Of course she could not see it, that which none but dying eyes could see, but her tears fell over him like rain. "Dear mother, don't-don't 'ee cry,—it does hurt me to see you take on so." She tried to stifle her sobs, and to make it appear that she was not crying. "Yes, mother," he said, "indeed you are crying-and you mustn't grieve for me, mother, I am going to

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a better place, to heaven, mother dear." There was another silence, and then he said, "mother, I must see Jamie before I die. Will you and father bring him in for me to look at? I want to see him how he looks in his coffin, and how nice we shall lie in the grave, both of us together." Exhausted as they were with grief and watching, the poor parents strove to gratify this strange request, and between them they lifted in the coffin which contained the mortal part of little Jamie. His brother looked at it long with a deep and loving interest; he just gathered up strength to kiss the waxen brow, and then he thanked his father and mother, and lay down again quite satisfied. His hands were clasped, and his eyes looked towards the east, upon which, after sunsetting, a golden fringe rested. There on the morrow, his home would be. What he saw there it is not given to us to know, (but the experience both of medical men and of others who are accustomed to watch over death-beds, attests this point, that spiritual appearances, and these of two sorts, are wont to be in attendance on the dying.)

Perhaps the gates of his Father's House were open, and he could see the glory through them. And still, as the night drew on, he lay, not so much changed, as transfigured; his eye and his ear taken up with visions and with voices. At

last there fell a deeper stillness, a shadow seemed to move along the wall; and Death was come and gone; for oh, he can indeed appear very gentle.

"They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided." Close to the grave we have last opened, but in an allblessed contrast of remembrance, we buried these three little ones together, whom surely Jesus beholding had loved. And together too, they will rise again and then their's shall be garments of white, and glistering, so as no fuller on earth can white them.

CHAPTER VII.

MINISTERING ANGELS.

The world's a room of sickness, where each heart
Knows its own anguish and unrest;

The truest wisdom there, and noblest art,
Is his, who skills of comfort best;
Whom, by the softest step and gentlest tone,
Enfeebled spirits own,

And love to raise the languid eye,

When, like an angel's wing, they feel him fleeting by.
Christian Year. S. Barnabas.

VERY cross and most unreasonable was Mrs. Jones -at least I thought so-as, with her arms bubbling up to the elbows in soap suds, and pounding and poking with all her might, in a sort of illustrative way, the wet things in the wash tub before her, she gave me a peremptory exposition of her notions of school discipline and order. She "should take her child away-that she should, for they didn't learn nothing at them schools; and the missus was that stupid,”—an expressive epithet which I was at the moment privately applying to the speaker herself, when the door of the cottage was opened, unperceived by either of us, and the

figure of a lady glided, rather than passed, by us; -she was tall and slender, and simply dressed in a grey cloth cloak and a coarse straw bonnet trimmed with a ribbon of dark blue; but there was in her movements that grace and almost musical harmony which one associates with refinement of race or of feeling, with the idea of a lady in its complete and most restricted sense. All at once she turned full round, and in doing so, revealed a face of exquisite beauty; features so delicate and white, they might have been chiselled out of ivory, a brow like what old painters used to give to their saints, and dark brown eyes, clear, soft, and almondshaped, such as often go with gentle blood. She did but pause to ask a question, kindly in form and gentle in voice, about the poor cripple who lodged above, and then she passed on upstairs. "That's the lady," presently said the gruff Mrs. Jones, but in an altered tone that betokened how oil had been insensibly poured on the troubled waters. "I reckon," she added, "she's been and brought something nice in her basket for the poor sick body overhead." In Germany they believe that any sudden, unaccountable pause in a conversation is occasioned by the passage through the company of a ministering angel, and certainly there was something on the present occasion near akin in its effects to such a softening presence.

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