was small and mean, immediately under the roof, with only one window.
There were plenty of better rooms in the house, but Fleda liked this
because it kept her near her grandfather; and indeed she had always had it
ever since her father's death, and never thought of taking any other.

She had a fashion, this child, in whom the simplicity of practical life
and the poetry of imaginative life were curiously blended,--she had a
fashion of going to her window every night when the moon or stars were
shining to look out for a minute or two before she went to bed; and
sometimes the minutes were more than any good grandmother or aunt would
have considered wholesome for little Fleda in the fresh night air. But
there was no one to watch or reprimand; and whatever it was that Fleda
read in earth or sky, the charm which held her one bright night was sure
to bring her to her window the next. This evening a faint young moon
lighted up but dimly the meadow and what was called the "east-hill,"
over-against which the window in question looked. The air was calm and
mild; there was no frost to-night; the stillness was entire, and the stars
shone in a cloudless sky. Fleda set open the window and looked out with a
face that again bore tokens of the experiences of that day. She wanted the
soothing speech of nature's voice; and child as she was she could hear it.
She did not know, in her simplicity, what it was that comforted and
soothed her, but she stood at her window enjoying.

It was so perfectly still, her fancy presently went to all those people
who had hushed their various work and were now resting, or soon would be,
in the unconsciousness and the helplessness of sleep. The
_helplessness_,--and then that Eye that never sleeps; that Hand that keeps
them all, that is never idle, that is the safety and the strength alike of
all the earth and of them that wake or sleep upon it,--