vertaken, were slain in cold blood, even
when in the act of prayer.

"Margaret Wilson, my heroine, was a young girl of eighteen. She was
taken prisoner by the soldiers, tried, and condemned to die, because she
steadily and courageously refused to acknowledge the supremacy of any
other than Christ in the Church. A few words might have saved her life;
but she would not utter them, because they would have been words of
falsehood, and, though she dared to die, she dared not tell a lie. So
they brought her out to the seashore, such as is before us now. The
tide was rising, but had not then begun long to turn. She had a fellow-
sufferer with her of her own sex--one who, like herself, preferred a
cruel death to denying Christ. This fellow-sufferer was an aged widow
of sixty-three. The sentence pronounced against them both was that they
should be fastened to stakes driven deeply into the sand that covered
the beach, and left to perish in the rising tide. The stake to which
the aged female was fastened was lower down the beach than that of the
younger woman, in order that the expiring agonies of the elder saint,
who would be first destroyed, might shake the firmness of Margaret
Wilson. The water soon flowed up to the feet of the old woman; in a
while it mounted to her knees, then to her waist, then to her chin, then
to her lips; and when she was almost stifled by the rising waves, and
the bubbling groan of her last agony was reaching her fellow-martyr
farther up the beach, one heartless ruffian stepped up to Margaret
Wilson, and, with a fiendish grin and mocking laugh, asked her, `What
think you of your friend now?' And what was the calm and noble reply?
`What do I see but Christ, in one of his members, wrestling there?
Think you that _we_ are the sufferers? No. It is Christ in us--he who
sendeth us not on a warfare upon our own charges.' She never flinched;
she sought no mercy from man. The waves reached her too at last; they
did the terrible work which man had made them do. The heroic girl
passed from the hour of mortal struggle into the perfect peace of her
Saviour's presence."

As she finished, Julia looked with tearful eyes into her aunt's face,
and said gently, "Dear auntie, Christ was her strength; and," she added
in a whisper, "I believe he was mine."

"Yes, yes, precious child," said Miss Huntingdon, drawing her closely to
her, "I am sure it was so; and the one great lesson we may learn from
our three