ot stretch it out, he did not
venture to pull a hair out of the sinner's head. And tears gushed from
his eyes like a stream of mercy and love, the cooling waters of
which extinguished the eternal fire of hell.

Just then the cock crowed.

"Father of all mercy, grant Thou to her the peace that I was
unable to procure for her!"

"I have it now!" said the dead woman. "It was your hard words,
your despair of mankind, your gloomy belief in God and His creation,
which drove me to you. Learn to know mankind! Even in the wicked one
lives a part of God--and this extinguishes and conquers the flame of
hell!"

The pastor felt a kiss on his lips; a gleam of light surrounded
him--God's bright sun shone into the room, and his wife, alive,
sweet and full of love, awoke him from a dream which God had sent him!

BY THE ALMSHOUSE WINDOW

Near the grass-covered rampart which encircles Copenhagen lies a
great red house. Balsams and other flowers greet us from the long rows
of windows in the house, whose interior is sufficiently
poverty-stricken; and poor and old are the people who inhabit it.
The building is the Warton Almshouse.

Look! at the window there leans an old maid. She plucks the
withered leaf from the balsam, and looks at the grass-covered rampart,
on which many children are playing. What is the old maid thinking
of? A whole life drama is unfolding itself before her inward gaze.

"The poor little children, how happy they are--how merrily they
play and romp together! What red cheeks and what angels' eyes! but
they have no shoes nor stockings. They dance on the green rampart,
just on the place where, according to the old story, the ground always
sank in, and where a sportive, frolicsome child had been lured by
means of flowers, toys and sweetmeats into an open grave ready dug for
it, and which was afterwards closed over the child; and from that
moment, the old story says, the ground gave way no longer, the mound
remained firm and fast, and was quickly covered with the green turf.
The little people who now play on that spot know nothing of the old
tale, else would they fancy they heard a child crying deep below the
earth, and the dewdrops on each blade of grass would be to them
tears of woe. Nor do they know anything of the Danish King who here,
in the face of the coming foe, took an oath before all his trembling
courtiers that he would hold out with the citizens of his capital, and
die here in his nes