little ones were treated, would be a very practical Gospel to our
young scholar in Christian philanthropy. Were matters sometimes
strained? did little jars arise and a shadow now and then gather on
the faces of the strangers because their own mother was not? The wise
foster-mother would set all right again by some merry quip, some
gleesome turn, some one of those playful gleams of humour which
furnish a key to the secret of successful work among the young. To be
a mother to those orphans, to make life in its duties and joys, as
far as possible, the same to them as if they had not lost their own
mother, ay, and to teach them to gather the brightest roses from the
thorniest bushes, was at once a good work in itself, and a model for
one who was destined to similar service, only on an immensely wider
scale and on a tenfold more difficult field. The sisterly fostering
of the orphans was a providential training for her future life-work.
To learn to love and to serve over and above the claims of mere
natural affection, could not fail to enlarge the heart and awaken the
sympathies of a quick, susceptible child. Little did her mother know
what she was doing when she took the orphans to her bosom. She only
thought to make a warm home and a bright future for the hapless pair;
but in effect she was preparing a warm home and a bright future for
thousands of the poorest children on God's earth.

But there was something better in store. Girlish days swept by much
as usual--the rapid growth of warm thought and feeling making each
revolving year a continuous springtide, an opening summer. At
nineteen, Annie Macpherson looked out on a world that always promises
more to youthful eyes than it ever fulfils. Eager hope was drawing
much on a future whose furthest horizon was Time. Suddenly a shadow
fell. A word spoken by a friend was the vehicle of a divine message.
A more distant and awful horizon arose to view: Time with its hopes