But Magdalis was very tender and timid, and a little proud; proud not for herself, but for her husband and his babes. And she was also feeble in health. She was an orphan herself, and she had married, against the will of her kindred in a far-off city, the young stone-carver, whose genius they did not appreciate, whose labor and skill had made life so rich and bright to them while he lived, and whose early death had left them all so desolate. For his dear sake, she would not complain. For herself it had been easier to die, and for his babes she would not bring the shame of beggary on them. Better for them to enter into this life maimed of strength, she thought, by meager food, than tainted with the taint of beggary. Rather, she thought, would their father himself have seen them go hungry to bed than deserve that the fingers of other children should be pointed scornfully at them as "the little beggars by the church door," the door of the church in which she gloried to think there were stones of his carving. So she toiled on, carving for sale little devotional symbols--crosses, and reliquaries, and lilies and lambs--with the skill she had learnt from him, and teaching the little ones, as best she could, to love and work and suffer. Teaching them only, perhaps, not quite enough to hope. For the lamp of hope burnt low in her own heart, and therefore her patience, not being enough the patience of hope, lacked something of sweetness. It never broke downward into murmurs, but it too seldom soared upward into praise. So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with straw, which served him for a bed. It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the hermit was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear angels to think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did think it good for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good angels at all, not even as kind as the ravens which took the bread to Elijah when they were told. For the dear Heavenly Father had certainly told the angels always to take care of little children. The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the angels seemed. For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow. He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor mother, and would not let her go to sleep again. He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed where she lay beside her mother, and say: