been preserved only by an involuntary banishment into the
wilderness. The new outrage, by which she had provoked her fate,
seemed to render further lenity impossible; and a gentleman in
military dress, with a stout man of inferior rank, drew towards
the door of the meeting-house, and awaited her approach.

Scarcely did her feet press the floor, however, when an
unexpected scene occurred. In that moment of her peril, when
every eye frowned with death, a little timid boy pressed forth,
and threw his arms round his mother.

"I am here, mother; it is I, and I will go with thee to prison,"
he exclaimed.

She gazed at him with a doubtful and almost frightened
expression, for she knew that the boy had been cast out to
perish, and she had not hoped to see his face again. She feared,
perhaps, that it was but one of the happy visions with which her
excited fancy had often deceived her, in the solitude of the
desert or in prison. But when she felt his hand warm within her
own, and heard his little eloquence of childish love, she began
to know that she was yet a mother.

"Blessed art thou, my son," she sobbed. "My heart was withered;
yea, dead with thee and with thy father; and now it leaps as in
the first moment when I pressed thee to my bosom."

She knelt down and embraced him again and again, while the joy
that could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like
the bubbles gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep