"Pray don't trouble me about the money. If it is enough, well—if not, I will give you more."
Here the minister came in. His wife moved toward him with the gold in her hands.
"See what the Lord has done for us through this lady," she said.
He glanced at the gold, smiled benignly, and with gentle politeness inquired the lady's name.
"Mrs. Mason—Ellen Mason, of South Carolina," she answered, coloring as she spoke. "Rose, my dear, come and shake hands with the gentleman."
Rose shut the fanciful little basket that she carried on her arm and came forward smiling in all her features; but as she stood on tiptoe pursing her pretty mouth like a rosebud, her mother took up the basket. The little girl saw it, broke away from the minister's hold and ran back, crying out:
"Oh, ma—ma! take care or you'll break my string of robins' eggs!"
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE VILLAGE DOCTOR IN A SNOW-STORM.
Snow! deep, deep snow everywhere! It lay three feet on a level in the river vale. It spread a shining crust over the hills. It lodged in the branches of the densely green pine woods, and whitened the roof of every house in the neighborhood. The burying-ground on the hill, was wrapped so deep in a fleecy shroud, that you could hardly distinguish the marble grave-stones from its white surface, and the church, always a beautiful object, with its slender steeple and white walls, looked like a temple wrought from the snow itself—something that the angels had visited overnight, and left spotless as themselves.