sleepiness.

Accordingly, little Fanny was soon locked in a sound sleep, while her
mamma quietly pursued her work beside her. They had been perhaps some
ten minutes thus circumstanced, when my wife heard the window softly
raised from without--a bony hand parted the curtains, and Mr. Smith
leaned into the room.

She was so utterly overpowered at sight of this apparition, that even had
it, as she expected, climbed into the room, she told me she could not
have uttered a sound, or stirred from the spot where she sate transfixed
and petrified.

"Ha, ha!" he said gently, "I hope you'll excuse this, I must admit, very
odd intrusion; but I knew I should find you here, and could not resist
the opportunity of raising the window just for a moment, to look in upon
a little family picture, and say a word to yourself. I understand that
you are troubled, because for some cause you cannot say your
prayers--because what you call your 'faith' is, so to speak, dead and
gone, and also because what _you_ consider bad thoughts are constantly
recurring to your mind. Now, all that is very silly. If it is really
impossible for you to believe and to pray, what are you to infer from
that? It is perfectly plain your Christian system can't be a true
one--faith and _prayer_ it everywhere represents as the conditions of
grace, acceptance, and salvation; and yet your Creator will not _permit_
you either to believe or pray. The Christian system is, forsooth, a
_free_ gift, and yet he who formed _you_ and _it_, makes it absolutely
impossible for you to accept it. _Is_ it, I ask you, from your own
experience--is it a free gift? And if your own experience, in which you
can't be mistaken, gives its pretensions the lie, why, in the name of