"It be queer to see them together. They be as thick as thieves," said Nat to his wife with a broad smile, as he sat down to table for the dish of tea he always looked for before he went up to see that all was in order with the lamp before the dusk fell. "As for me, I can't get a word out of him no how; but the little chap, he makes him talk as I never knew he could. I can't hear what they say. Bless you! if I so much as look that way, Jim shuts up his mouth like as if no power on earth would open it, and Pat he goes as red as a rose, as if he was half ashamed to be caught chattering; but so soon as my back's turned they're at it again. And glad I be that the poor chap has found somebody to love and to care for him; for he's had a hard life of it, if all we hear of him be true." "That's just what I think, Nat," answered Eileen. "I'm glad the boy has found the way to his heart. Sure it's a bad thing for any creature to be shut up against his fellow-men as he was. May be it's the blessed saints as have sent the child to him to show him a better way." Eileen still spoke sometimes about the "blessed saints," as she had been used to do in her childhood, when she lived amongst those who used even to pray to them; but her husband would smile and shake his head when he heard the words, and to-day he answered slowly and thoughtfully-- "Nay, my lass; it's no doing of the saints above--not that I'm one to say they are not blessed, nor that they may not look down upon us poor creatures here below and think of us as their brethren; but it's the Lord as rules the world for us, and gives each one of us a work to do for Him somehow; and if our boy has been sent as a messenger to this poor chap--as like enough he has--it's the Lord's own doing, that's what it is; and we won't say a word to discourage him, not though it may seem as though he'd got a tough job before him if he's got to win back Jim." The ready tears started to Eileen's eyes. She came over and put her hand on Nat's broad shoulder, bending to kiss him, though he was not a man who as a rule cared to receive caresses from even his own wife or child. "It does me good to hear you talk like that. Sure and it's the children who are often the Lord's best messengers. I heard a holy man say once as the beautiful angels were God's messengers, and it does seem sometimes as though He used the children too--may be because they are most like the angels themselves--bless their innocent little hearts!"