“But it was Sunday,” she said, when speaking of it afterwards, “and I wouldn’t have that spoiled. There was the rest day for us, whatever Monday might bring, and bread for so long, anyway. Every now and then I seemed to hear those words, ‘The Lord will provide,’ and I took the message and put the worry right out of my mind. I had got into a way of never asking for money or anything of that sort on Sundays, and I didn’t on that one. I just enjoyed it in the reg’lar way with my John and the children, and, though I did see a bit of a cloud on his face now and then, I never pretended to notice, but smiled back, and it went. I never slept better than I did that Sunday night.” “And when Monday came?” I asked. “Help came, in quite a _nateral_ sort of way, as it seemed, through John’s old master. He said we had been on his mind all Sunday, and he’d brought us the loan of a sovereign. We could pay it back at sixpence a week, but there was no hurry. We must be a bit behindhand through John’s illness. The master was always just, but he was reckoned a hard man, and he went out of his way when he lent that sovereign. Didn’t my heart go up to God in thankfulness that Monday morning, and wasn’t I glad to tell my John, ‘He has provided.’” I have always thought that this dear woman realised the privileges and preciousness of the Sabbath in a greater degree than anyone else I ever knew. Let us cull a thought or two from the utterances of George Herbert, the country parson, who was, in 1630, inducted into the parsonage of Pemberton, and who has been called the “Keble of the age which boasted of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Ben Jonson.” I could wish that his life (written by Izaak Walton) and his works, in prose and poetry, were in every girl’s bookcase. It is passing from the unlettered peasant woman to the cultured divine, but the quotations I will give you show how the same spirit actuates high and low, the ignorant and the learned, when, as the children of God, they express their sense of the infinite preciousness of the Sabbath. Herbert’s poem called “Sunday” is too long to quote as a whole, but you will enjoy reading some quotations from it. “O day most calm, most bright! The fruit of this, the next world’s bud, Th’ endorsement of supreme delight, Writ by a Friend, and with His blood; The couch of time; care’s balm and bay, The week were dark, but for thy light, Thy torch doth show the way. * * * * * Sundays the pillars are, On which Heaven’s palace archèd lies; The other days fill up the spare And hollow room with vanities. They are the fruitful beds and borders In God’s rich garden; that is bare Which parts their ranks and orders.”