that God has created. "Look out, Isabel, I do believe that the sky you
see yonder is heaven."

"Heaven!" cried Isabel, starting forward and struggling to reach the
door, "Heaven! oh, Mary, it makes me think of mamma"--

Mary fell back in her chair, frightened by the effect of her
enthusiasm.

"There is nothing, I can see nothing but hills, corn, lots, and sky,"
said the beautiful child, drawing back and looking at Mary with her
great, reproachful eyes half full of tears.

"Oh, Isabel, I did not mean that, not the real heaven, where
your--where our mother is, where they all are--but it was so beautiful
over yonder, the sky and all, I could not help saying what I did."

Isabel drew back to her seat half petulant, half sorrowful; she was
not really child enough to think that Mary could have spoken of heaven
as a place actually within view; still it was not wonderful that the
thought had for a moment flashed across her brain. Heaven itself could
not have seemed more strange to those children than the magnificent
mountain scenery through which they were passing. Born in the city,
they were thrown for the first time among the most beautiful scenery
that man ever dreamed of, with all their wild, young ideas afloat. Is
it wonderful, then, that an imaginative child like Mary should have
cried out the name of heaven in her admiration, or that Isabel, so
lately made an orphan, should have sent forth the cry of mother,
mother, from the depths of her poor little heart when she heard the
heaven mentioned, where she believed her mother was still longing for