"O, we don't want a lamp all this moon!" cried Bell.
The boy sat half undressed at the window. "Bell loves moonlight like a fairy," he said.
Bell's robe fell to her knees in snowy folds, and she stood like a petite Venus rising from the froth. Then brother and sister braided their voices in a simple prayer to Our Father in Heaven. They prayed for kind old Nanny, and for one on the wide sea.
"When will father come home?" asked Bell, for the hundredth time that day.
"It will not be long now. When the boughs of the cherry trees are an inch deep with ice, and the logs crackle in the fire-place—then he will come. Let us go to sleep, and dream of him."
And thus, hand in hand, the two went in to Dream-land—
The world of Sleep,
The beautiful old World!
The dreamy Palestine of pilgrim Thought!
The Lotus Garden, where the soul may lie
Lost in elysium, while the music moan
Of some unearthly river, faintly caught,
Seems like the whispering of Angels, blown
Upon æolian harp-strings! And we change
Into a seeming something that is not!