The hot, dry channel was broken up, and tears flowed in plenteous measure. From the softening soul sprang her first real prayer. "Oh! be my Father and Comforter!" When Rachel awoke in the morning, she saw that her mistress had unbarred the shutters of the window by her bed, and was reading. Her face had a still deeper shade of gloom; but the attached girl drew a favorable augury from this mark of interest in anything, except her own thoughts. The book was a mother's gift--a Bible; she had read it with tolerable regularity for the giver's sake, but she found herself now lamentably ignorant of its contents. She read of the unapproachable purity of the Immaculate, of judgment and justice; denunciation of the wicked, and the "fearful looking for of vengeance" that remained to rebellious children; in vain she searched it for a message to her--a promise she could apply. Her alarm augmented, as the fruitlessness of her endeavors became apparent. The life she had lightly esteemed was inestimably dear, as she realised what eternity was; and her heart was still with fear at the thought of the uncertain tenure by which she held it. In times past she would have blushed at these shakings of spirit; now she could not banish them. She would not be left alone an instant; she was afraid to sleep, lest she should not awake in time. She had said, "what evil have I done?" she saw now that she had committed evil, and that continually; as she beheld "idolatry, hatred, variance, emulation, wrath, envyings" in the same enumeration with monstrous vices--a catalogue which brings to our ears the warring clash of Pandemonium, rendered more horribly discordant by contrast with the gentle music of "Love, joy, peace, long-suffering." In angry despair she threw the volume aside; but tortured conscience drove her to it again. "I _will_ be a Christian," was her primal resolve,--as the terrors of the law flamed before her--"I _must_ be!" and a week of labor and agony ended in a total sinking of hope, and an exhausted cry, "I cannot!" It was a calm Sabbath in the Indian Summer, and her chair was wheeled to the door. The "summer's late, repentant smile" shone fondly upon the landscape; the russet fields, the dismantled forests, the swift-rolling river.