lot I most envied was that of the contented Shepherd Boy in the
Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs, and wearing "the
herb called Heart's Ease in his bosom"; but all the glorious ups and
downs of the "Progress" I would gladly have shared with Christiana and
her children, never desiring to turn aside into any "By-Path Meadow"
while Mr. Great-Heart led the way, and the Shining Ones came down to
meet us along the road. It was one of the necessities of my nature, as
a child, to have some one being, real or ideal, man or woman, before
whom I inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mr. Great-Heart was the
perfect hero of my imagination. Nobody, in books or out of them,
compared with him. I wondered if there were really any Mr. Great-Hearts
to be met with among living men.

I remember reading this beloved book once in a snow-storm, and looking
up from it out among the white, wandering flakes, with a feeling that
they had come down from heaven as its interpreters; that they were
trying to tell me, in their airy up-and-down-flight, the story of
innumerable souls. I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake, and
to follow its course until it touched the earth. But I found that I
could not. A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and
return, to descend and then ascend again, as if hastening homeward to
the sky, losing itself at last in the airy, infinite throng, and
leaving me filled with thoughts of that "great multitude, which no man
could number, clothed with white robes," crowding so gloriously into
the closing pages of the Bible.

Oh, if I could only be sure that I should some time be one of that
invisible company! But the heavens were already beginning to look a
great way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,--

"Who are these in bright array?"

and that seemed to bring them nearer again.

The history of the early martyrs, the persecutions of the Waldenses and
of the Scotch Covenanters, I read and re-read with longing emulation!
Why could not I be a martyr, too? It would be so beautiful to die for
the truth as they did, as Jesus did! I did not understand then that He
lived and died to show us what life really means, and to give us true
life, like His,--the life of love to God with all our hearts, of love
to all His human children for His sake;--and that to live this life
faithfully is greater even than to die a martyr's death.

It puzzled me to know what some of the talk I heard ab