One of God’s holy angels
Did walk with me that day.”
Only Sunny was not an angel, but an ordinary little girl. A good little girl generally, but capable of being naughty sometimes. She will have to try hard to be good every day of her life, as we all have. Still, with her sweet, grave face, and her soft, pretty ways, there was something of the angel about her this day.
Her mamma tried to make her understand, in a dim way, what “church” meant,—that it was saying “thank you” to God, as mamma did continually; especially for His giving her her little daughter. How He lived up in the sky, and nobody saw Him, but He saw everybody; how He loved Little Sunshine, just as her papa and mamma loved her, and was glad when she was good, and grieved when she was naughty. This was all the child could possibly take in, and even thus much was doubtful; but she listened, seeming as if she comprehended a small fragment of the great mystery which even we parents understand so little. Except that when we look at our children, and feel how dearly we love them, how much we would both do and sacrifice for them, how if we have to punish them it is never in anger but in anguish and pain, suffering twice as much ourselves the while,—then we can faintly understand how He who put such love into us, must Himself love infinitely more, and meant us to believe this, when He called Himself our Father. Therefore it was that through her papa’s and mamma’s love Sunny could best be taught her first dim idea of God.
She walked along very sedately, conversing by the way, and not attempting to dart from side to side, after one object or another, as this butterfly child always does on a week-day. But Sunday, and Sunday clothes, conduced exceedingly to proper behaviour. Besides, she felt that she was her mamma’s companion, and was proud accordingly. Until, just before reaching the church, came a catastrophe which certainly could not have happened in any other church-going walk than this.
A huge, tawny-coloured bull stood in the centre of the road, with half a dozen cows and calves behind him. They moved away, feeding leisurely on either side the road, but the bull held his ground, looking at mamma and Sunny from under his shaggy brows, as if he would like to eat them up.
“Mamma, take her!” whispered the poor little girl, rather frightened, but neither crying nor screaming.
Mamma popped her prayer-book in her pocket, dropped her parasol on the ground, and took up her child on her left arm, leaving the right arm free. A fortnight ago she would have been alarmed, but now she understood the ways of these Highland cattle, and that they were not half so dangerous as they looked. Besides, the fiercest animal will often turn before a steady, fearless human eye. So they stood still, and faced the bull, even Sunny meeting the creature with a gaze as firm and courageous as her mamma’s. He stood it for a minute or so, then he deliberately turned tail, and walked up the hillside.
“The big bull didn’t hurt Sunny! He wouldn’t hurt little Sunny, would he, mamma?” said she, as they walked on together. She has the happiest conviction that no creature in the world would ever be so unkind as to hurt Sunny. How should it, when she is never unkind to any living thing? When the only living thing that ever she saw hurt—a wasp that crept into the carriage, and stung Sunny on her poor little leg, and her nurse was so angry that she killed it on the spot—caused the child a troubled remembrance. She talked, months afterward, with a grave countenance, of “the wasp that was obliged to be killed, because it stung Sunny.”
She soon looked benignly at the big bull, now standing watching her from the hillside, and wanted to play with the little calves, who still stayed feeding near. She was also very anxious to know if they were going to church too? But before the question—a rather puzzling one—could be answered, she was overtaken by the rest of the congregation, including Maurice and Eddie with their parents. The two boys only smiled at her, and walked into church, so good and grave that Sunny was impressed into preternatural gravity too. When the rest were seated, she, holding her mamma’s hand, walked quietly in as if accustomed to it all and joined the congregation.