sleeping child in her arms, and they started, he on foot by the side
of his wife, and his donkey following. No one saw them pass through
the gate of the town.

They were not sure of the way, for they had been partly asleep as they
came, but so long as they went downward, and did not leave the road,
they could hardly go wrong! The child slept all the way.



Chapter IV.

The new family.


How shall a man describe what passed in the mind of a childless wife,
with a motherless boy in her arms! It is the loveliest provision,
doubtless, that every child should have a mother of his own; but there
is a mother-love--which I had almost called more divine--the love,
namely, that a woman bears to a child because he is a child,
regardless of whether he be her own or another's. It is that they may
learn to love thus, that women have children. Some women love so
without having any. No conceivable treasure of the world could have
once entered into comparison with the burden of richness Mrs. Porson
bore. She told afterward, with voice hushed by fear of irreverence,
how, as they went down one of the hills, she slept for a moment, and
dreamed that she was Mary with the holy thing in her arms, fleeing to
Egypt on the ass, with Joseph, her husband, walking by her side. For
years and years they had been longing for a child--and here lay the
divinest little one, with every mark of the kingdom upon him! His