ced to lie down
under the friendly shelter of some wayside hedge, utterly unable to drag
himself another step? Would Joe and Moll find them and force them back
to a life of lovelessness, hardship, and degradation? Oh, surely not!
and the dwarf's soul sank within him as he contemplated the bare
possibility of such failure and defeat.

For a while Bambo gave way to despondency and these by no means
unnatural fears. Soon, however, this mood passed away, banished as
swiftly as mist before sunshine, by the recollection of a promise--old
almost as the everlasting hills, yet new as the song which the redeemed
ones sing around the throne of God,--

"Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I
will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee
with the right hand of my righteousness."

Like a whisper of sweetest music the peace of the words stole over the
dwarf's troubled spirit, soothing and fortifying him so that he felt
himself no longer a weakling, a pigmy, but a veritable giant to fight
and to endure. And with a smile upon his lips and a light not of earth
in his sunken eyes, Bambo and his charges slipped noiselessly away from
the bear, the monkey, and the caravan, and set out, not to _seek_ the
Happy Land, as Darby said with one of his quaint, grave glances, but
this time to _find_ it.

* * * * *

The first streaks of sunlight were lighting up the landscape before the
little party paused to take a rest, and to eat some of the food which
the dwarf's fore-thought had provided. Darby found a dry seat upon the
trunk of a fallen tree. Upon it they sat and ate their breakfast of cold
rabbit and dry bread, washed down by a draught of pure water carried in
a tin porringer from a spring which bubbled out of the bank hard by--a
spring that was half hidden by the feathery moss, trailing periwinkle,
and brown fern fronds with which it was surrounded. The children
breakfasted heartily, their early outing having sharpened their
appetites; but Bambo's eating was only a pretence, for he was not
hungry. Joan was a fairly solid weight for a girl of five, and he had
carried her in his arms nearly all the way from the encampment. He was
tired and exhausted in consequence; his hands burned, his lips were
parched, his brow fevered. He laved his face with the clear, cool water;
and after a long, deep drink from the porringer, which Joan held to his
lips with all t