ultitude of people? Let him
come forth, for I must know to whom I commit this most precious
trust."

She turned her face upon the male auditors, and after a momentary
delay Tobias Pearson came forth from among them. The Quaker saw the
dress which marked his military rank, and shook her head; but then she
noted the hesitating air, the eyes that struggled with her own and
were vanquished, the color that went and came and could find no
resting-place. As she gazed an unmirthful smile spread over her
features, like sunshine that grows melancholy in some desolate spot.
Her lips moved inaudibly, but at length she spake:

"I hear it, I hear it! The voice speaketh within me and saith, 'Leave
thy child, Catharine, for his place is here, and go hence, for I have
other work for thee. Break the bonds of natural affection, martyr thy
love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom hath its ends.'
I go, friends, I go. Take ye my boy, my precious jewel. I go hence
trusting that all shall be well, and that even for his infant hands
there is a labor in the vineyard."

She knelt down and whispered to Ilbrahim, who at first struggled and
clung to his mother with sobs and tears, but remained passive when she
had kissed his cheek and arisen from the ground. Having held her hands
over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.

"Farewell, friends in mine extremity," she said to Pearson and his
wife; "the good deed ye have done me is a treasure laid up in heaven,
to be returned a thousandfold hereafter.--And farewell, ye mine
enemies, to whom it is not permitted to harm so much as a hair of my
head, nor to stay my footsteps even for a moment. The day is coming
when ye shall call upon me to witness for ye to this one sin
uncommitted, and I will rise up and answer."

She turned her steps toward the door, and the men who had stationed
themselves to guard it withdrew and suffered her to pass. A general
sentiment of pity overcame the virulence of religious hatred.
Sanctified by her love and her affliction, she went forth, and all the
people gazed after her till she had journeyed up the hill and was lost
behind its brow. She went, the apostle of her own unquiet heart, to
renew the wanderings of past years. For her voice had been already
heard in many lands of Christendom, and she had pined in the cells of
a Catholic Inquisition before she felt the lash and lay in the
dungeons of the Puritans. Her mission had extended also to th