_Blackwood's Magazine._

* * * * *


THE SNOW-WHITE VIRGIN.

(Continued from page 125.)


Her life seemed to be the same in sleep. Often at midnight, by the light
of the moon shining in upon her little bed beside theirs, her parents
leant over her face, diviner in dreams, and wept as she wept, her lips
all the while murmuring, in broken sentences of prayer, the name of Him
who died for us all. But plenteous as were his penitential
tears--penitential, in the holy humbleness of her stainless spirit, over
thoughts that had never left a dimming breath on its purity, yet that
seemed, in those strange visitings, to be haunting her as the shadows of
sins--soon were they all dried up in the lustre of her returning smiles!
Waking, her voice in the kirk was the sweetest among many sweet, as all
the young singers, and she the youngest far, sat together by themselves,
and within the congregational music of the psalm, uplifted a silvery
strain that sounded like the very spirit of the whole, even like angelic
harmony blent with a mortal song. But sleeping, still more sweetly sang
the "Holy Child;" and then, too, in some diviner inspiration than ever
was granted to it while awake, her soul composed its own hymns, and set
the simple scriptural words to its own mysterious music--the tunes she
loved best gliding into one another, without once ever marring the
melody, with pathetic touches interposed never heard before, and never