held me so that I could see well into it. The light flashed in a hundred
glories of colour from a multitude of cut but unset stones that lay loose
in it. I soon learned that most of them were of small money-value, but
their beauty was none the less entrancing. There were stones of price
among them, however, and these were the first he taught me, because they
were the most beautiful. My fault had opened a new source of delight: my
stone-lesson was now one of the great pleasures of the week. In after
years I saw in it the richness of God not content with setting right what
is wrong, but making from it a gain: he will not have his children the
worse for the wrong they have done! We shall lose nothing by it: he is
our father! For the hurting sand-grain, he gives his oyster a pearl.

"There," said my uncle, "you may look at them as often as you please;
only mind you put every one back as soon as you have satisfied your eyes
with it. You must not put one in your pocket, or carry it about in your
hand."

Then he set me down, saying,

"Now you must go to bed, and dream about the pretty things. I will tell
you a lot of stories about them afterward."

We had a way of calling any kind of statement _a story_.

I never cared to ask how it was that, seeing all the same I had done the
wrong thing, the whole weight of it was gone from me. So utterly was it
gone, that I did not even inquire whether I ought so to let it pass from
me. It was nowhere. In the fire of my uncle's love to me and mine to him,
the thing vanished. It was annihilated. Should I not be a creature
unworthy of life, if, now in my old age, I, who had such an uncle in my