was his
sun-dial,--"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he
went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all
the Dalton horses since daybreak.

She had just two hours for doing the greatest piece of work she had done
in her short life. And consciously it was the greatest work. Every
stroke of that pen, every straight line and curve and capital, seemed to
require as much deliberation as the building of a house; and how her
brain worked! Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the
eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the
far-spreading walnut,--stretch forth your importunate necks and lift
aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests!--the little girl
who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within
there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great
world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he
will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along
with _his_ letter to his son.

She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before
must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,--it was so evident
that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.

So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a
lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,--does
it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold
from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning
its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true
agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.

"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says
you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you
were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I
want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit
of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a
moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that
her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of
course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had
written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure,
her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.

At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page
the blacksmith had s