passions; but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's
lips have pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.

----The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up into
her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him. It was
the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of bitterness,
and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.

The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever saw
him shed.

The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his head
and was still. All the questions he had meant to ask had faded from his
memory. The tests he had prepared by which to judge of his
fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their virtue.
He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite Parent. The
kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from heaven, that
angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a moment before to
summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.

Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.--A little before he
would have said, Shall I pray _for_ you?--The Christian religion, as
taught by its Founder, is full of _sentiment_. So we must not blame the
divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the parable
of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has been the
stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.