“Since then there has been quite a religious revival in that village! Their minister has told them that so signal an interposition of divine providence must have been meant as a sign to them, to rebuke scoffers and to prove the truth of holy scripture and of the Christian religion--and nobody seems to see the colossal conceit involved in such an astonishing proposition. “But the effect on the boy has been undoubtedly good, morally as well as physically; by all accounts he was a careless enough young scamp before, but now he feels ‘his angel’ may be near him at any time, and he will never do or say anything rough or coarse or angry, lest it should see or hear. The one great desire of his life is that some day he may see it again, and he knows that when he dies its lovely face will be the first to greet him on the other side.” A beautiful and pathetic little story, truly. The moral drawn from the occurrence by the village and its minister is perhaps somewhat of a _non sequitur_; yet the testimony to the existence of at least something beyond this material plane must surely do the people more good than harm, and after all the mother’s conclusion from what she saw was a perfectly correct one, though more accurate knowledge would probably have led her to express it a little differently. An interesting fact afterwards discovered by the investigations of the writer of the letter throws a curious side-light upon the reasons underlying such incidents. It was found that the two boys had met before, and that some thousands of years ago the one who fell from the cliff had been the slave of the other, and had once saved his young master’s life at the risk of his own, and had been liberated in consequence; and now, long afterwards, the master not only repays the debt in kind, but also gives his former slave a high ideal and an inducement to morality of life which will probably change the whole course of his future evolution. So true is it that no good deed ever goes unrewarded by karma, however tardy it may seem in its action--that Though the mills of God grind slowly, Yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience stands He waiting, With exactness grinds He all. CHAPTER VIII. THE STORY OF A FIRE. Another piece of work done by the same boy Cyril furnishes an almost exact parallel to some of the stories from the books which I have given in earlier pages. He and his older friend, it seems, were passing along in the prosecution of their usual work one night, when they noticed the fierce glare of a big fire below them, and promptly dived down to see if they could be of any use.