me!" said the doctor, "cheer up, my girl, you've got a fine
little daughter,--the Lord mingles mercies with his afflictions."

Her eyes closed, her head moved with a mournful but decided dissent.

A moment after she spoke in the sad old words of the Hebrew Scripture,--

"Call her not Naomi; call her Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very
bitterly with me."

And as she spoke, there passed over her face the sharp frost of the last
winter; but even as it passed there broke out a smile, as if a flower
had been thrown down from Paradise, and she said,--

"Not my will, but thy will," and so was gone.

Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey were soon left alone in the chamber of death.

"She'll make a beautiful corpse," said Aunt Roxy, surveying the still,
white form contemplatively, with her head in an artistic attitude.

"She was a pretty girl," said Aunt Ruey; "dear me, what a Providence! I
'member the wedd'n down in that lower room, and what a handsome couple
they were."

"They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not divided," said Aunt Roxy, sententiously.

"What was it she said, did ye hear?" said Aunt Ruey.

"She called the baby 'Mary.'"

"Ah! sure enough, her mother's name afore her. What a still,
softly-spoken thing she always was!"

"A pity the poor baby didn't go with her," said Aunt Roxy;
"seven-months' children are so hard to raise."

"'Tis a pity," said the other.

But babies will live, and all the more when everybody says that it is a
pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death. It
was ordered by THE WILL above that out of these two graves should spring
one frail, trembling autumn flower,--the "Mara" whose poor little roots
first struck deep in the salt, bitter waters of our mortal life.

CHAPTER III

THE BAPTISM AND THE BURIAL

Now, I cannot think of anything more unlikely and uninteresting to make
a story of than that old brown "linter" house of Captain Zephaniah
Pennel, down on the south end of Orr's Island.

Zephaniah and Mary Pennel, like Zacharias and Elizabeth, are a pair of
worthy, God-fearing people, walking in all the commandments and
ordinances of the Lord blameless; but that is no great recommendation to
a world gaping for sensation and calling for something stimulating. This
worthy couple never read anything but the Bible, the "Missionary
Herald," and the "Christian Mirror,"--never went anywhere except in the
round of daily b