“My brave darling, I hope and believe your troubles are at an end. I only wonder your strength has survived the hardships of such a life as yours has been the past year.”
“Think of how much has happened in the last short weeks!”
“True, ours has been a courtship in which the bitter and the sweet have been equally mingled, but now the peace complete is coning love, for King Philip is dead and the war is over.”
THE PICTURE.
BY MARY D. BRINE.
It was only a simple picture,
The simplest, perhaps, of all
The many and costly paintings
That hung on the parlor wall;
But it held my gaze the longest,
And it touched my inmost heart
With a pathos in which the others
Held neither place nor part.
It showed me a lonely hill-side,
Where the light of the day had fled,
And the clouds of an angry twilight
Were gathering overhead;
And under the deepening shadows,
Tired and sore afraid,
A sheep and her lamb were grieving,
Far from the sheepfold strayed.
Only a simple picture;
But oh, how full of truth,
Which silently spoke from the canvas
Its lesson of age and youth!
For are we not sheep, sore needing
The safety of Christ’s own fold?
And do we not often wander
Far from his loving hold,
Heedless of where we are straying
Till the light of day has fled,
And perchance a storm is gathering
With the shadow of night o’erhead?
My little one came beside me,
And climbed to my waiting knee,
And lifted her gaze to the picture,
Which told its story to me.