d his words together were twice depriving her
of parents. Yielding to her feelings, the poor girl went aside and wept.

The very opposite emotions of the two girls kept both silent for a long
time. Judith gave water to the sufferer frequently, but she forbore to
urge him with questions, in some measure out of consideration for his
condition, but, if truth must be said, quite as much lest something he
should add in the way of explanation might disturb her pleasing belief
that she was not Thomas Hutter's child. At length Hetty dried her tears,
and came and seated herself on a stool by the side of the dying man, who
had been placed at his length on the floor, with his head supported by
some coarse vestments that had been left in the house.

"Father," she said "you will let me call you father, though you say you
are not one--Father, shall I read the Bible to you--mother always said
the Bible was good for people in trouble. She was often in trouble
herself, and then she made me read the Bible to her--for Judith wasn't
as fond of the Bible as I am--and it always did her good. Many is the
time I've known mother begin to listen with the tears streaming from her
eyes, and end with smiles and gladness. Oh! father, you don't know how
much good the Bible can do, for you've never tried it. Now, I'll read a
chapter and it will soften your heart as it softened the hearts of the
Hurons."

While poor Hetty had so much reverence for, and faith in, the virtues
of the Bible, her intellect was too shallow to enable her fully to
appreciate its beauties, or to fathom its profound and sometimes
mysterious wisdom. That instinctive sense of right which appeared to
shield her from the commission of wrong, and even cast a mantle of
moral loveliness and truth around her character, could not penetrate
abstrusities, or trace the nice affinities between cause and effect,
beyond their more obvious and indisputable connection, though she
seldom failed to see all the latter, and to defer to all their just
consequences. In a word, she was one of those who feel and act correctly
without being able to give a logical reason for it, even admitting
revelation as her authority. Her selections from the Bible, therefore,
were commonly distinguished by the simplicity of her own mind, and were
oftener marked for containing images of known and palpable things than
for any of the higher cast of moral truths with which the pages of that
wonderful book abound--wonder