the world awake before it. This was different; it was like the summer
dawn, a soft suffusion of light growing every moment. And by and by it
occurred to her that she was not in the little room where she had lain
down. There were no dim walls or roof, her little pictures were all
gone, the curtains at her window. The discovery gave her no uneasiness
in that delightful calm. She lay still to think of it all, to wonder,
yet undisturbed. It half amused her that these things should be changed,
but did not rouse her yet with any shock of alteration. The light grew
fuller and fuller round, growing into day, clearing her eyes from the
sweet mist of the first waking. Then she raised herself upon her arm.
She was not in her room, she was in no scene she knew. Indeed it was
scarcely a scene at all--nothing but light, so soft and lovely that it
soothed and caressed her eyes. She thought all at once of a summer
morning when she was a child, when she had woke in the deep night which
yet was day, early--so early that the birds were scarcely astir--and had
risen up with a delicious sense of daring, and of being all alone in the
mystery of the sunrise, in the unawakened world which lay at her feet to
be explored, as if she were Eve just entering upon Eden. It was curious
how all those childish sensations, long forgotten, came back to her as
she found herself so unexpectedly out of her sleep in the open air and
light. In the recollection of that lovely hour, with a smile at herself,
so different as she now knew herself to be, she was moved to rise and
look a little more closely about her and see where she was.

When I call her a little Pilgrim, I do not mean that she was a child;
on the contrary, she was not even young. She was little by nature, with
as little flesh and blood as was consistent with mortal life; and she
was one of those who are always little for love. The tongue found
diminutives for her; the heart kept her in a perpetual youth. She was so
modest and so gentle that she always came last so long as there was any