not lost nor forgotten, but longing for a token of her Saviour's care.
When he rose from his knees, she thanked him again, but with more visible emotion than before, said:
"Sir, I doubt not God directed you here; and there is one favor more I have asked of Him and now ask through you. Three years ago my eldest daughter died in my arms, assured of rest, but leaving behind her a babe not two weeks old. 'Mother,' she said, just as she was dying, 'I leave my child with you to bring her to me in heaven. You will do it for Christ's sake, and mine, and hers, mother. And, mother, He has told us to give little children to Him in baptism. Dear mother, promise that my child shall be baptized.' I promised, and her spirit departed. Ever since, I have been praying and waiting for some minister to find his way to us, but in vain. More than once I heard of some who had come as far as Lake Pleasant, but none reached Piseco, and I almost feared that I should die and not be able to tell my child in heaven that the blessed water had been on her baby's face. Yet, even in this, God has been good to me. You will baptize my little one?"
How gladly the chaplain assented, may be readily imagined. The child was called in from her play on the grass-plat; her rosy, wondering face was gently washed, and her light brown hair parted on her forehead, and she stood, with her bare white feet, on a low bench by her grandmother's pillow. The grandfather filled an antique silver bowl with water, freshly dipped from a spring near the door. An old brass-clasped folio of Luther's Bible was laid open at the family record beside the water, the chaplain's broad hat on the other side. He thought not, and none thought of his coarse gray coat or his heavy boots. He was full of his sacred office, and the presence of the Invisible was upon him. The feeble woman, strengthened by love and faith, raised herself higher on the bed and put her wasted arm over the plump shoulders of the fair, blue-eyed child. The old man and his daughters, and the dull-witted servant at the kitchen-door, reverently standing, sobbed aloud; and, amidst the tears of all except her whose source of tears was dried up for ever, the chaplain recited the touching prayer of the Reformed Churches before the baptism of
