e pilgrim of a new life had been called
Mara in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,--the minister
slowly repeating thereafter those beautiful words of Holy Writ, "A
father of the fatherless is God in his holy habitation,"--as if the
baptism of that bereaved one had been a solemn adoption into the
infinite heart of the Lord.

With something of the quaint pathos which distinguishes the primitive
and Biblical people of that lonely shore, the minister read the passage
in Ruth from which the name of the little stranger was drawn, and which
describes the return of the bereaved Naomi to her native land. His voice
trembled, and there were tears in many eyes as he read, "And it came to
pass as she came to Bethlehem, all the city was moved about them; and
they said, Is this Naomi? And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi;
call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went
out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why then call
ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty
hath afflicted me?"

Deep, heavy sobs from the mourners were for a few moments the only
answer to these sad words, till the minister raised the old funeral
psalm of New England,--

"Why do we mourn departing friends,
Or shake at Death's alarms?
'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
To call them to his arms.

"Are we not tending upward too,
As fast as time can move?
And should we wish the hours more slow
That bear us to our love?"

The words rose in old "China,"--that strange, wild warble, whose
quaintly blended harmonies might have been learned of moaning seas or
wailing winds, so strange and grand they rose, full of that intense
pathos which rises over every defect of execution; and as they sung,
Zephaniah Pennel straightened his tall form, before bowed on his hands,
and looked heavenward, his cheeks wet with tears, but something sublime
and immortal shining upward through his blue eyes; and at the last verse
he came forward involuntarily, and stood by his dead, and his voice rose
over all the others as he sung,--

"Then let the last loud trumpet sound,
And bid the dead arise!
Awake, ye nations under ground!
Ye saints, ascend the skies!"

The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver hair, and they
that looked beheld his face as it were the face of an angel; he had
gotten a sight of the city whose foundation