He listened awhile to the mournful whinny of the mules; to the sound of artillery rolling up the resonant pike; to the crashing of newly-arrived regiments through the cedars as they made their camps in line-of-battle; to little spurts of firing between the nervous pickets, and at last fell asleep to dream that he was returning to Sardis, maimed but honor-crowned, to claim Rachel as his exultant bride. --- The Christmas forenoon was quite well-advanced before the fatigue of Rachel Bond's long ride was sufficiently abated to allow her to awaken. Then a soft hum of voices impressed itself upon her drowsy senses, and she opened her eyes with the idea that there were several persons in the room engaged in conversation. But she saw that there was only Aunt Debby, seated in a low rocking-chair by the lazily burning fire, and reading aloud from a large Bible that lay open upon her knees. The reading was slow and difficult, as of one but little used to it, and many of the longer words were patiently spelled out. But this labored picking the way along the rugged path of knowledge, stumbling and halting at the nouns, and verbs, and surmounting the polysyllables a letter at a time, seemed to give the reader a deeper feeling of the value and meaning of each word, than is usually gained by the more facile scholar. As Rachel listened she became aware that Aunt Debby was reading that wonderful twelfth chapter of St. Luke, richest of all chapters in hopes and promises and loving counsel for the lowly and oppressed. She had reached the thirty-fifth verse, and read onward with a passionate earnestness and understanding that made every word have a new revelation to Rachel: “Let your loins be girded up, and your lights burning; “And ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their Lord when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh they may open unto him immediately. “Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching; verily I say unto you that he shall gird himself and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them. “And if ye shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and shall find them so, blessed are those servants. “And this now that if the good man of the house had known what the hour the thief would come he would have watched, and not suffered his house to be broken through. “Be ye therefore ready also, for the Son of Man cometh at an hour when ye think not.” Rachel stirred a little, and Aunt Debby looked up and closed the book.