Melbourne House, Volume 1 | Page 4

till Nora took off her sunbonnet to serve for a new basket. And such joyous, lively, rambling talk as they had all three, too; it was twice as good as they had before; or as Daisy, who was quiet in her epithets, phrased it, "it was nice." By Mr. Dinwiddie's help they could go faster and further than they could alone; he could jump them up and down the rocks, and tell them where it was no use to waste their time in trying to go.
They had wandered, as it seemed to them, a long distance--they knew not whither--when the children's exclamations suddenly burst forth, as they came out upon the Sunday-school place again. They were glad to sit down and rest. It was just sundown, and the light was glistening, crisp and clear, on the leaves of the trees and on the distant hill-points. In the west a mass of glory that the eye could not bear was sinking towards the horizon. The eye could not bear it, and yet every eye turned that way.
"Can you see the sun?" said Mr. Dinwiddie.
"No, sir,"--and "No, Marmaduke."
"Then why do you look at it?"
"I don't know!" laughed Nora; but Daisy said: "Because it is so beautiful, Mr. Dinwiddie."
"Once when I was in Ireland," said the gentleman, "I was looking, near sunset, at some curious old ruins. They were near a very poor little village where I had to pass the night. There had been a little chapel or church of some sort, but it had crumbled away; only bits of the walls were standing, and in place of the floor there was nothing but grass and weeds, and one or two monuments that had been under shelter of the roof. One of them was a large square tomb in the middle of the place. It had been very handsome. The top of it had held two statues, lying there with hands upraised in prayer, in memory of those who slept beneath. But it was so very old--the statues had been lying there so long since the roof that sheltered them was gone, that they were worn away so that you could only just see that they had been statues; you could just make out the remains of what had been the heads and where the hands had been. It was all rough and shapeless now." [Footnote A: See frontispiece.]
"What had worn the stone so?" asked Daisy.
"The weather--the heat and the cold, and the rain, and the dew."
"But it must have taken a great while?"
"A very great while. Their names were forgotten--nobody knew whose monument or what church had been there."
"More than a hundred years?" asked Nora.
"It had been many hundred."
"O Duke!"
"What's the matter? Don't you believe that people died many hundred years ago?"
"Yes; but--"
"And they had monuments erected to them, and they thought their names would live forever; but these names were long gone, and the very stone over their grave was going. While I sat there, thinking about them, and wondering what sort of people they were in their lifetime,--the sun, which had been behind a tree, got lower, and the beams came striking across the stone and brightening up those poor old worn heads and hands of what had been statues. And with that the words rushed into my head, and they have never got out since,--'Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.'"
"When, Mr. Dinwiddie?" said Daisy, after a timid silence.
"When the King comes!" said the young man, still looking off to the glowing west,--"the time when he will put away out of his kingdom all things that offend him. You may read about it, if you will, in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, in the parable of the tares."
He turned round to Daisy as he spoke, and the two looked steadily into one another's faces; the child wondering very much what feeling it could be that had called an additional sparkle into those bright eyes the moment before, and brought to the mouth, which was always in happy play, an expression of happy rest. He, on his part, queried what lay under the thoughtful, almost anxious, search of the little one's quiet grey eyes.
"Do you know," he said, "that you must go home? The sun is almost down."
So home they went--Mr. Dinwiddie and Nora taking care of Daisy quite to the house. But it was long after sundown then.
"What has kept you?" her mother asked, as Daisy came in to the tea-table.
"I didn't know how late it was, mamma."
"Where have you been?"
"I was picking wintergreens with Nora Dinwiddie."
"I hope you brought me some," said Mr. Randolph.
"O I did, papa; only I have not put them in order yet."
"And where did you and Nora part?"
"Here, at the door, mamma."
"Was she alone?"
"No, ma'am--Mr.