ope, lacked something of
sweetness. It never broke downward into murmurs, but it too seldom
soared upward into praise.

So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little
Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with
straw, which served him for a bed.

It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it
must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril
of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the
hermit was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear
angels to think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did
think it good for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good
angels at all, not even as kind as the ravens which took the bread to
Elijah when they were told. For the dear Heavenly Father had certainly
told the angels always to take care of little children.

The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the
angels seemed.

For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the
last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow.

He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his
little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor
mother, and would not let her go to sleep again.

He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next
morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed
where she lay beside her mother, and say:

"Dear Lenichen! See, God has sent you this bit of bread as a Christmas
gift."

For the next day was Christmas Eve.

This little plan made Gottlieb so happy that at first it felt as good to
him as eating the bread.

But the happy thought, unhappily, did not long content the hungry animal
part of him, which craved, in spite of him, to be filled; and, as the
night went on, he was sorely tempted to eat the precious crust--his very
own crust--himself.

"Perhaps it was ambitious of me, after all," he said to himself, "to
want to seem like a blessed angel, a messenger of God, to Lenichen.
Perhaps, too, it would not be true. Because, after all, it would not be
exactly God who sent the crust, but only me."

And with the suggestion, the little hands which had often involuntarily
felt for the crust, brought it to the hungry little mouth.

But at that moment it opportunely happened that his mother made a little
moan in her sleep, which