How mysterious are all thy ways and workings, O gracious Nature! Thou
who art but a name given by our souls, seeing and hearing through the
senses, to the Being in whom all things are and have life! Ere two years
old, she, whose dream is now with us, all over the small silvan world,
that beheld the revelation, how evanescent! of her pure existence, was
called the "Holy Child!" The taint of sin--inherited from those who
disobeyed in Paradise--seemed from her fair clay to have been washed out
at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears. So pious people
almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other children, in the
serenity of that habitual smile that clothed the creature's countenance
with a wondrous beauty, at an age when on other infants is but faintly
seen the dawn of reason, and their eyes look happy, just like the
thoughtless flowers. So unlike all other children--but unlike only
because sooner than they--she seemed to have had given to her--even
in the communion of the cradle--an intimation of the being and the
providence of God. Sooner, surely, than through any other clay that ever
enshrouded immortal spirit, dawned the light of reason and of religion
on the face of the "Holy Child."

Her lisping language was sprinkled with words alien from common
childhood's uncertain speech, that murmurs only when indigent nature
prompts;--and her own parents wondered whence they came in her
simplicity, when first they looked upon her kneeling in an unbidden
prayer. As one mild week of vernal sunshine covers the braes with
primroses, so shone with fair and fragrant feelings--unfolded, ere they
knew, before her parents' eyes--the divine nature of her who, for a
season, was lent to them from the skies. She learned to read out of the
Bible--almost without any teaching--they knew not how--just by looking
gladly on the words, even as she looked on the pretty daisies on the