“Oh, yes! give them to me! how could I forget them. She was so anxious they should be done,” said Margaret, with an eagerness strangely at variance with her earnest, mournful countenance. In unrolling the packet, she came upon the shirt-ruffles that she knew her mother had been hemming. There were the very last stitches she had set. There was the delicate needle just where she had stuck it when she left her sewing to go out into the garden that fatal morning. Margaret burst into tears and wept as if her heart would break, until she became exhausted. Then she reverently rolled up that relic, saying: “I cannot finish this ruffle. I would not draw out the needle her fingers put there, for the world. I will keep this unchanged in remembrance of her.” “And when will you be willing to come home?” said Mrs. Houston. “After my father comes and goes. I would rather stay here near her to meet him.” “And, when he goes, will you come?” “Yes.” After dinner Mrs. Houston left Plover’s Point. Margaret remained, and, each morning after breakfast, took her little workbasket and walked through the woods down beside the grave, and sat sewing there all day. One day while she sat thus a gentle footstep approached, a soft hand was laid upon her shoulder and a loving voice murmured her name. Margaret looked up to see the mild old minister, Mr. Wellworth, standing near her. “My child,” he said, “why do you sit here day after day to give way to grief?” “Oh, Mr. Wellworth, I do not sit here to give way to grief. I only sit here to be near her,” pleaded Margaret. “But, my child, do you know that you grieve as one without hope and without God in the world?” Margaret did not answer; she had never in her life received any religious instruction, and scarcely understood the bearing of the minister’s words. “Shall I tell you, Margaret, of Him who came down from heaven to light up the darkness of the grave?” Margaret raised her eyes in a mute, appealing glance to his face. “Shall I speak of Him, Margaret? Of Him, of whom, when his friends had seen him dead and buried out of their sight, the angel of the sepulchre said, ‘He is not here, but risen?’” Still that uplifted, appealing gaze. “Of Him, Margaret, who said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life?’” “Oh, yes! yes! tell me of Him! tell me something to relieve this dreadful sense of loss and death that is pressing all the life out of my heart,” said Margaret, earnestly. The old man took the seat beside her, held her hand in his own, and for the first time opened to her vision the spiritual views of life, death and immortality--of man, Christ and God. Sorrow softens and never sears the heart of childhood and youth. Sorrow had made very tender and impressible the heart of the orphan; its soil was in a good state for the reception of the good seed. To hear of God the Father, of Christ the Saviour, of the Holy Ghost the Comforter--was to her thirsting and fainting spirit the very water of life.