sed to know him in other days, and Jim was
not--

She interrupted him and shook her head. Was it good for the boy to have
that kind of a man in the house?

The cobbler looked at her thoughtfully and touched her arm gently.

"This," he said, "ain't no winter to let a feller from Sing Sing be on the
street."

The letter the postman brought made me see all this and more in the
snowflake that fell and melted in my garden. It came from a friend in the
far West, a gentle, high-bred lady, and told me this story: Her sister,
who devotes her life to helping the neighbor, had just been on a visit to
her home. One day my friend noticed her wearing an odd knitted shawl, and
spoke of it.

"Yes," said she, "that is the shawl the cook gave me."

"The cook?" with lifted eyebrows, I suppose. And then she heard how.

One day, going through the kitchen of the institution where she teaches,
she had seen the cook in tears and inquired the cause. The poor woman
sobbed out that her daughter had come home to die. The doctors had said
that she might live perhaps ten days, no longer, and early and late she
cried for her mother to be with her. But she had vainly tried every way to
get a cook to take her place--there was none, and her child was dying in
the hospital.

"And I told her to go to her right away, I would see to that; that was
all," concluded my friend's sister; "and she gave me this shawl when she
came back, and I took it, of course. She had worked it for the daughter
that died."

But it was not all. For during ten days of sweltering July heat that
gentle, delicate woman herself superintended the kitchen, did the cooking,
and took the place of the mother who was soothing her dying child's brow,
and no one knew it. Not here, that is. No doubt it is known, with a
hundred such daily happenings that make the real story of human life,
where that record is kept and cherished.

And clear across the continent it comes to solve a riddle that had puzzled
me. Recently I had long arguments with a friend about religion and dogmas
that didn't help either of us. At the end of three weeks we were farther
apart than when we began, and the arguments had grown into controversy
that made us both unhappy. We had to have a regular treaty of peace to
get over it. I know why now. The snowflake and my friend's letter told me.
Those two, the cobbler and the woman, were real Christians. They had the
secret. They knew the neighbor, if neither had ever