e yard, and I had a
presentiment that it was concerning what I had cut out; I therefore
stepped softly out into the balcony, and saw the grandmother standing
below, and with beaming face, holding my clipped-out paper at arm's
length. A whole crowd of Dalecarlians, men and women, stood around,
all in artistic ecstacy over my work; but the little girl--the sweet
little child--screamed, and stretched out her hands after her lawful
property, which she was not permitted to keep, as it was too fine.

I sneaked in again, yet, of course, highly flattered and cheered; but
a moment after there was a knocking at my door: it was the
grandmother, my hostess, who came with a whole plate full of
spice-nuts.

"I bake the best in all Dalecarlia," said she; "but they are of the
old fashion, from my grandmother's time. You cut out so well, Sir,
should you not be able to cut me out some new fashions?"

And I sat the whole of Midsummer night, and clipped fashions for
spice-nuts. Nutcrackers with knights' boots, windmills which were both
mill and miller--but in slippers, and with the door in the
stomach--and ballet-dancers that pointed with one leg towards the
seven stars. Grandmother got them, but she turned the ballet-dancers
up and down; the legs went too high for her; she thought that they had
one leg and three arms.

"They will be new fashions," said she; "but they are difficult."

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE.

* * * * *

Truth can never be at variance with truth, science can never militate
against faith: we naturally speak of them both in their purity: they
respond to and they strengthen man's most glorious thought:
_immortality_. And yet you may say, "I was more peaceful, I was safer
when, as a child, I closed my eyes on my mother's breast and slept
without thought or care, wrapping myself up simply in faith." This
prescience, this compound of understanding in everything, this
entering of the one link into the other from eternity to eternity,
tears away from me a support--my confidence in prayer; that which is,
as it were, the wings wherewith to fly to my God! If it be loosened,
then I fall powerless in the dust, without consolation or hope.

I bend my energies, it is true, towards attaining the great and
glorious light of knowledge, but it appears to me that therein is
human arrogance: it is, as one should say, "I will be as wise as God."
"That you shall be!" said the serpent to our first parent