her. No one ever feared that she would die young out of sheer goodness.
You would not have loved her so much for what she was as because you
couldn't help yourself. This feat once accomplished, she blossomed into
a thousand graces, each one more bewitching than the last you noted.

Where, in the name of all the sacred laws of heredity, did the child get
her sunshiny nature? Born in misery, and probably in sin, nurtured in
wretchedness and poverty, she had brought her "radiant morning visions"
with her into the world. Like Wordsworth's immortal babe, "with trailing
clouds of glory" had she come, from God who was her home; and the heaven
that lies about us all in our infancy,--that Garden of Eden into which
we are all born, like the first man and the first woman,--that heaven
lay about her still, stronger than the touch of earth.

What if the room were desolate and bare? The yellow sunbeams stole
through the narrow window, and in the shaft of light they threw across
the dirty floor Gay played,--oblivious of everything save the flickering
golden rays that surrounded her.

The raindrops chasing each other down the dingy pane, the snowflakes
melting softly on the casement, the brown leaf that the wind blew into
her lap as she sat on the sidewalk, the chirp of the little
beggar-sparrows over the cobblestones, all these brought as eager a
light into her baby eyes as the costliest toy. With no earthly father or
mother to care for her, she seemed to be God's very own baby, and He
amused her in his own good way; first by locking her happiness within
her own soul (the only place where it is ever safe for a single moment),
and then by putting her under Timothy's paternal ministrations.

Timothy's mind traveled back over the past, as he sat among the tin cans