“I don’t want to be buried in the snow and die,” she thought, “for I ain’t very good; I’m an awful sinner, granny says, and sure to go to perdition, but I ain’t so certain about that. God wouldn’t be very hard on a little girl who has been treated as mean as I have. He’d make some allowance for my dreadful bringing up. I wonder if He is here now; Olly says He is everywhere, and if He is and can see me in my tantrums He can see me in the dark. I mean to pray to Him just as good as I can, and ask Him to take care of me;” and kneeling by the old log, with the darkness all about her, and the snow-flakes falling thickly upon her upturned face, she began a prayer which was a strange mixture of what she had heard at St. Luke’s, where she had once been with Oliver, what she had often heard at the prayer meetings which she had frequently attended with Aunt Hepsy, and of her real self as she thought and felt. She began: “Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners, for if I know my own heart, I think I have made a new consecration of all that I have and all that I am since we last met, and henceforth I mean to,—mean to,——” Here the mere form of words left her, and the child Milly spoke out and told her trouble to God. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “if you be really here, and if you can hear what I say, as Olly says you can, I wish you’d come up close to me, right here by the log, so I needn’t feel afraid while I tell you how granny has whipped me so many times for ’most nothing, and never let me have a real doll or do anything I wanted to, and I’ve been so unhappy there, and wicked, too, and mad at her, and called her ugly names behind her back, and would to her face, only I dassent, and I’ve made mouths at her and wished I could lick her, and have even in my tantrums been mean to Olly, and twitted him about his twisted feet, and pulled his hair and spit at him as fast as I could spit, and loved him all the time, and now I’ve runned away and the cars have left me when I was going in them to Boston to see Lawrence Thornton and be Miss Geraldine’s waiting-maid, and it’s dark and cold and snowy here in the woods, and I am afraid of something, I don’t know what, and I can’t go back to granny, who would almost skin me alive, and she ain’t my granny either; some Maine woman sent me to Judge Howell, in a thunder-storm and basket, and I’m nobody’s little girl; so, please, Jesus, take care of me and tell me where to go and what to do, and I’m so sorry for all my badness, especially to Olly, for Christ’s sake, Amen.” This was a very long prayer for Milly, who had never before said more than “Now I lay me,” or the Lord’s prayer; but God saw and heard the little desolate child, and answered her touching appeal. “There, I feel better and not so lonesome, already,” she said, as she rose from her knees and groped around to find some better place of shelter than the old log afforded.