“O Seppi! but to have been strong and well would have made up for that,” said Squib, whose active spirit could not imagine a more terrible loss than that of the power of locomotion.
“I don’t know,” answered Seppi. “I think I am happier than Peter, who is strong and big. I don’t think I want to be anybody else. It’s just as Herr Adler said it would be.”
“What did he say?” asked Squib, with interest.
“It was the first time he came; at least, the first time I can remember about. I was out with the goats. I had not been lame long, and I was often unhappy. I missed the things I had been used to do, and I wanted to do them again. I was crying about it one day, and he saw me, and came and sat down by me and talked. He said such beautiful things.”
“Tell me what they were.”
“Yes; but I can’t make them sound as he does, you know. He first told me about how God had taken care of me down in the ice, and had helped father to get me up safe again; and he said I must not think any more about its being the ice-maidens, because that was nothing but the fancy of people who lived amongst mountains, and that God would never let His children be subject to such beings, even if they had any existence; but when I cried again about being lame, he was kinder still, and told me that it was perhaps because the Lord loved me that He had laid His hand upon me, because it says somewhere that whom He loveth He chasteneth—it is in the Bible.”
Squib nodded his head.
“Yes, I know. I came upon it reading once with mother. I said it seemed like you.”
Seppi’s face flushed with pleasure and gratitude.
“Did you? How kind to think of me, little Herr! Well, I won’t tell you the things of that sort which he said. I expect you know them all yourself; but he told me other things that I had never thought about before. He said that if God took away from us one of our powers, He was always ready to make it up to us by giving us more of another; and that, if we could learn to be submissive, and to take everything He sent us as His gift, we should soon find that we were not the worse, but the better for it!”