Mr. Ambrose was slowly walking on, musing on the patient sufferings of his little friend, now gone to her rest, when just as he approached the beautiful old porch of the church his train of thought was suddenly disturbed by hearing what seemed to him the low, deep sobbing of excessive grief. The night was not so dark but that he could see distinctly within the porch, and he anxiously endeavoured to discover whether the sound had proceeded from any one who had taken shelter there for the night; but the place was evidently tenant less. "It must have been only the hum of a passing breeze, which my fancy has converted into a human voice," thought he, "for assuredly no such restless sobs as those ever escape from the deep sleepers around me here." And so the idea was soon banished and forgotten. But as he stood there, his gaze became, almost unconsciously, fixed upon the old church porch. The dim light resting upon it threw the rich carvings of its graceful arches, and deep-groined roof, with its massive bosses of sculptured stone, into all sorts of fantastic forms, and a strange mystery seemed to hang about the solemn pile, which completely riveted his attention to it, and led him into the following reverie:--"Ah, thou art indeed a 'beautiful gate of the temple'! Well and piously did our ancestors in bestowing so much wealth and labour to make thy walls so fair and lovely. And well ever have they done in crowding these noble porches with the sacred emblems of our holy faith. Rightly have they deemed that the very highest efforts of human art could not be misapplied in adorning the threshold of God's House, so that, ere men entered therein, their minds might be attuned to the solemnity of the place[22]. All praise, too, to those honest craftsmen who cemented these old stones so well together that they have stood the storms of centuries, and still remain the unlettered though faithful memorials of ages long gone by. Ah, how many scenes my imagination calls up as I look on this old porch! Hundreds of years ago most of the sacred offices of our Church were there in part performed. Now, I think I see the gay bridal party standing in that dusky portal[23]; there comes the Priest to join the hands of the young and happy pair; he pronounces over them the Church's blessing; and the bridegroom endows with her bridal portion her whom he has sworn to love till one shall die. A thousand brides and bridegrooms, full of bright hopes of happy years, have been married in that porch. Centuries ago they grew old and died, and were buried in this churchyard, but the old porch still remains in all its beauty and all its strength. There, kneeling upon that well-worn pavement, I see the mother pour forth her thankfulness to God for her deliverance from sickness, and for the babe she bears[24]. And now, still beneath that porch, she gives her tender infant into the arms of God's priest, that he may present it to Him in holy Baptism.