"Isabel, Isabel, look out--look look," whispered the excited child, turning with that sort of wild earnestness peculiar to persons of vivid imaginations, when once set on fire with some beautiful thing that God has created. "Look out, Isabel, I do believe that the sky you see yonder is heaven." "Heaven!" cried Isabel, starting forward and struggling to reach the door, "Heaven! oh, Mary, it makes me think of mamma"-- Mary fell back in her chair, frightened by the effect of her enthusiasm. "There is nothing, I can see nothing but hills, corn, lots, and sky," said the beautiful child, drawing back and looking at Mary with her great, reproachful eyes half full of tears. "Oh, Isabel, I did not mean that, not the real heaven, where your--where our mother is, where they all are--but it was so beautiful over yonder, the sky and all, I could not help saying what I did." Isabel drew back to her seat half petulant, half sorrowful; she was not really child enough to think that Mary could have spoken of heaven as a place actually within view; still it was not wonderful that the thought had for a moment flashed across her brain. Heaven itself could not have seemed more strange to those children than the magnificent mountain scenery through which they were passing. Born in the city, they were thrown for the first time among the most beautiful scenery that man ever dreamed of, with all their wild, young ideas afloat. Is it wonderful, then, that an imaginative child like Mary should have cried out the name of heaven in her admiration, or that Isabel, so lately made an orphan, should have sent forth the cry of mother, mother, from the depths of her poor little heart when she heard the heaven mentioned, where she believed her mother was still longing for her child? She sat down cowering close in a corner of the seat, and in order to conceal her tears turned her face to the cushions. "Sit up," the lady interposed, "my beauty, sit up; don't you see how your pretty marabouts are being crushed against the side of the carriage? Nonsense, child, what can you be crying about?" "My mother, oh, she made me think of my mother. I thought--it seemed as if she must be there." The lady frowned and looked toward the Judge with a pettish movement of the head. "Be quiet, child, I am your mother, now; remember that, I am your mother." Isabel looked up and gazed through her tears at the pale, characterless face, bent in weak displeasure upon her. "I am your mother," repeated the lady, in a tone that she intended to be impressive, but it was only snappish; "your benefactress, your more than mamma; forget that you ever had any but me." "I can't, oh, dear, I never can," cried the child, bursting into a passion of tears, and casting her face back upon the cushion. Mrs. Farnham seized the child by the shoulder, and placed her, with a slight shake, upright.