you a cut from within
me--surely I must know my own satire!"

"Ink-pipkin!" cried the Pen.

"Writing-stick!" cried the Inkstand.

And each of them felt a conviction that he had answered well; and it
is a pleasing conviction to feel that one has given a good answer--a
conviction on which one can sleep; and accordingly they slept upon it.
But the poet did not sleep. Thoughts welled up from within him, like
the tones from the violin, falling like pearls, rushing like the
storm-wind through the forests. He understood his own heart in these
thoughts, and caught a ray from the Eternal Master.

To _Him_ be all the honour!

THE CHILD IN THE GRAVE.

There was mourning in the house, sorrow in every heart. The youngest
child, a boy four years old, the joy and hope of his parents, had
died. There still remained to them two daughters, the elder of whom
was about to be confirmed--good, charming girls both; but the child
that one has lost always seems the dearest; and here it was the
youngest, and a son. It was a heavy trial. The sisters mourned as
young hearts can, and were especially moved at the sight of their
parents' sorrow. The father was bowed down, and the mother completely
struck down by the great grief. Day and night she had been busy about
the sick child, and had tended, lifted, and carried it; she had felt
how it was a part of herself. She could not realize that the child was
dead, and that it must be laid in a coffin and sleep in the ground.
She thought God _could not_ take this child from her; and when it was
so, nevertheless, and there could be no more doubt on the subject, she
said in her feverish pain:

"God did not know it. He has heartless servants here on earth, who do
according to their own liking, and hear not the prayers of a mother."

In her grief she fell away from God, and then there came dark
thoughts, thoughts of death, of everlasting death, that man was but
dust in the dust, and that with this life all was ended. But these
thoughts gave her no stay, nothing on which she could take hold; and
she sank into the fathomless abyss of despair.

In her heaviest hours she could weep no more, and she thought not of
the young daughters who were still left to her. The tears of her
husband fell upon her forehead, but she did not look at him. Her
thoughts were with the dead child; her whole thought and being were
fixed upon it, to call back every remembrance of the little one, every
innocent childis