and pitying her, as her brother sent her balls flying to remotest parts of the garden, to be hunted out from behind currant and gooseberry bushes’ thick shade.
It was a great pleasure to this little feeble city boy, with the love of the beautiful in Nature, which so often accompanies weakness of limb, to lie back on the cushions spread by his careful nurses under the old apple-tree’s shade, and drink in all the beauties of the scene.
Like a picture-gallery seemed the quaint garden, as, looking upward, between the opening in the leafy roof above, he caught glimpses of the blue sky, and his eye followed the islets of fleecy clouds in their fleeting passage. The thick, grassy carpet at his feet brought out, in all their brightness, the colors of the golden lily and the many-tinted ladyslippers which formed borders to the broad grass-plots. Butterflies, golden and russet-brown, were flitting all around him, whilst robins and bluebirds, from their air-swung perches, sang sweetly their morning hymns, and from the earth beneath, locusts and tiny crickets joined the glad chorus.
How true it is that our Father in Heaven has given a voice to every thing in Nature to praise and tell of His great Love! Can you wonder that this little feeble child, unable to join in the careless play of the merry group, taught by a Christian mother that God was all about and around him, should seem to hear His voice speaking in the beauty of the scene, and gently folding his thin, white hands, should sing, in low, sweet notes, the Morning Hymn?
“Now the dreary night is done,
Comes again the glorious Sun:
Crimson clouds and silver-white,
Wait upon his breaking light.
“Glistening in their garden beds,