“Yes, I hear things, but I cannot understand them. Listen to the wind in the branches of that tree, the chestnut, off which the leaf is falling now. It says something, if only I could catch it.”
“Yes, child, yes, you are right in a way; all Nature tells the same eternal tale, if our ears were not stopped to its voices,” he answered, with a sigh; indeed, the child’s talk had struck a vein of thought familiar to his own mind, and, what is more, it deeply interested him; there was a quaint, far-off wisdom in it.
“It is pleasant to-night, is it not, Mr. Fraser?” said the little maid, “though everything is dying. The things die softly without any pain this year; last year they were all killed in the rain and wind. Look at that cloud floating across the moon, is it not beautiful? I wonder what it is the shadow of; I think all the clouds are shadows of something up in heaven.”
“And when there are no clouds?”
“Oh! then heaven is quite still and happy.”
“But heaven is always happy.”
“Is it? I don’t understand how it can be always happy if we go there. There must be so many to be sorry for.”
Mr. Fraser mused a little; that last remark was difficult to answer. He looked at the fleecy cloud, and, falling into her humour, said—
“I think your cloud is the shadow of an eagle carrying a lamb to its little ones.”
“And I think,” she answered confidently, “that it is the shadow of an angel carrying a baby home.”