sister, followed on the same side.

"I don't know exactly how to say what I mean, papa, but I wish I could get
this lovely afternoon, all full of sunshine and blue, into unity with all
that you teach us about Jesus Christ. I wish this beautiful day came in
with my thought of him, like the frame--gold and red and blue--that you
have to that picture of him at home. Why doesn't it?"

"Just because you have not enough of faith in him, my dear. You do not know
him well enough yet. You do not yet believe that he means you all gladness,
heartily, honestly, thoroughly."

"And no suffering, papa?"

"I did not say that, my dear. There you are on your couch and can't move.
But he does mean you such gladness, such a full sunny air and blue sea of
blessedness that this suffering shall count for little in it; nay more,
shall be taken in for part, and, like the rocks that interfere with the
roll of the sea, flash out the white that glorifies and intensifies the
whole--to pass away by and by, I trust, none the less. What a chance you
have, my Connie, of believing in him, of offering upon his altar!"

"But," said my wife, "are not these feelings in a great measure dependent
upon the state of one's health? I find it so different when the sunshine is
inside me as well as outside me."

"Not a doubt of it, my dear. But that is only the more reason for rising
above all that. From the way some people speak of physical difficulties--I
don't mean you, wife--you would think that they were not merely the
inevitable which they are, but the insurmountable which they are not. That