St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls | Page 2

lilies and lambs--with the skill she had learnt from him,
and teaching the little ones, as best she could, to love and work and
suffer. Teaching them only, perhaps, not quite enough to hope. For the
lamp of hope burnt low in her own heart, and therefore her patience,
not being enough the patience of hope, lacked something of sweetness.
It never broke downward into murmurs, but it too seldom soared
upward into praise.
So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little
Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with
straw, which served him for a bed.
It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it
must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril
of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the hermit
was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear angels to
think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did think it good
for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good angels at all, not
even as kind as the ravens which took the bread to Elijah when they
were told. For the dear Heavenly Father had certainly told the angels
always to take care of little children.
The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the
angels seemed.

For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the
last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow.
He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his
little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor
mother, and would not let her go to sleep again.
He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next
morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed
where she lay beside her mother, and say:
"Dear Lenichen! See, God has sent you this bit of bread as a Christmas
gift."
For the next day was Christmas Eve.
This little plan made Gottlieb so happy that at first it felt as good to him
as eating the bread.
But the happy thought, unhappily, did not long content the hungry
animal part of him, which craved, in spite of him, to be filled; and, as
the night went on, he was sorely tempted to eat the precious crust--his
very own crust--himself.
"Perhaps it was ambitious of me, after all," he said to himself, "to want
to seem like a blessed angel, a messenger of God, to Lenichen. Perhaps,
too, it would not be true. Because, after all, it would not be exactly God
who sent the crust, but only me."
And with the suggestion, the little hands which had often involuntarily
felt for the crust, brought it to the hungry little mouth.
But at that moment it opportunely happened that his mother made a
little moan in her sleep, which half awakened Lenichen, who murmured,
sleepily, "Little mother, mother, bread!"
Whereupon, Gottlieb blushed at his own ungenerous intention, and
resolutely pushed back the crust under the pillow. And then he thought

it must certainly have been the devil who had tempted him to eat, and
he tried to pray.
He prayed the "Our Father" quite through, kneeling up softly in bed,
and lingering fondly, but not very hopefully, on the "Give us our daily
bread."
And then again he fell into rather melancholy reflections how very
often he had prayed that same prayer and been hungry, and into
distracting speculations how the daily bread could come, until at last he
ventured to add this bit of his own to his prayers:
"Dear, holy Lord Jesus, you were once a little child, and know what it
feels like. If Lenichen and I are not good enough for you to send us
bread by the blessed angels, do send us some by the poor ravens. We
would not mind at all, if they came from you, and were your ravens,
and brought us real bread. And if it is wrong to ask, please not to be
displeased, because I am such a little child, and I don't know better, and
I want to go to sleep!"
Then Gottlieb lay down again, and turned his face to the wall, where he
knew the picture of the Infant Jesus was, and forgot his troubles and
fell asleep.
The next morning he was awaked, as so often, by Lenichen's little bleat;
and he rose triumphantly, and took his crust to her bedside.
Lenichen greeted him with a wistful little smile, and put up her face for
a kiss; but her reception of the crust was somewhat disappointing.
She