es, unharmed, to their beds at midnight? It is all the work of the
soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's
passion--who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast,
hurried off by a demon to a hideous death--bear her limbs aloft wherever
there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer
and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in
blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap
her down the cliffs, and hold up her child in deliverance?

No stop--no stay--she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her
feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands
strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then,
but once crossed her heart, as up--up--up--to the little image made of
her own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing--will
not the same God save me when my child is at my breast?" Down came the
fierce rushing of the Eagle's wings--each savage bird dashing close to
her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once
they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an
ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the
Christian mother, falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and
blood, clasped her child--dead--dead--no doubt--but unmangled and
untorn, and swaddled up just as it was when she laid it down asleep
among the fresh hay in a nook of the harvest-field. Oh! what pang of
perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint, feeble
cry--"It lives! it lives! it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud
laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious
innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life and love. "O, thou
great and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou brought me--one of the
most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save me lest I perish, even for thy
own name's sake! O Thou, who died to save sinners, have mercy upon me!"
Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old
trees--far--far down--and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of
her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of
the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native
strath?--and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands
the cradle of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here
must she die--and when her breast is exha