will talk to me some day and ask me questions; I don’t know how to answer questions. Now, you know, I mean Don’s friend, Mr. Kenney.”

“Your pictures are very cheery. I hope you may tell some to poor old Aunt Rody.”

“I shall never dare. She snaps at me. She shuts me up and makes me forget what I want to say. Her eyes go through me. I don’t love Aunt Rody; I don’t want to love Aunt Rody. She doesn’t like baby girls,” contended Judith, shaking her yellow head. “She doesn’t like me and Doodles. We are shaggy and a nuisance.”

“You will not always stay a baby girl.”

“No; I want to grow up faster; I wish I might braid my hair. I want to write books and paint real pictures on canvas to earn money to take you to Switzerland. I’m sure you would get well in Switzerland. I see the pictures I would paint, and I think the books; but I am so slow about it. Sweeping, and washing dishes, and doing errands, do not help at all,” she said with a laugh that had no discouragement in it.

“They all help. Every obedient thing helps. You must grow up to your book and your picture; living a sweet, joyous, truthful, obedient life is growing up to it. The best books and the best pictures are the expression of the truest and sweetest life; the strongest and wisest life; am I talking over your head, dear?”

“No,” laughed Judith, “down into my heart.”

“My little girl has been her mother’s companion all these years; I fear I sometimes forget that you are only a little girl. But if you have grown old, you will grow young. I wish I could find a girl friend for you. But God knows all the girls in the world, and he will find one for you. If my daughter remembers all her life but one truth her mother ever said to her, I hope it may be this: The true life is the life hid with Christ; no other life is life, it is playing at life; this life is safe, still, hidden away, growing stronger every day; the expression of it, the making it speak he will take care of every hour of the day. You cannot understand this now—my words tell you so little, but they will come back to you.”

“I will write it down,” promised Judith, who loved to write things down, “and date it February fifteenth. Told in the Firelight. I know what it means better than I can say it. I often know what things mean, but I cannot say it.”

“Any more pictures?” suggested her mother, in a voice as bright as Judith’s own.

“An old face with pink cheeks and a long gray curl behind each ear, the softest step and the kindest voice—but I always forget and put sounds in my pictures. Those sounds are always in my picture of Aunt Affy.”

“You have not made a picture of Aunt Rody.”

“I don’t like to tell a picture of Aunt Rody. She is so old, so old—and she isn’t happy—and I don’t believe she’s good. If it were not for Aunt Rody I should think all old people were good; that all you had to do to be good was to grow up and grow old.”

“She is not happy. Once, years and years ago, so long ago that almost everybody has forgotten, she had a bitter disappointment.”

“What was it about, mother?” asked the girl, who always wove a love-story into the stories she planned as she stepped about the kitchen, or darned and mended the household wear.

“She was ready to be married—she learned that the man she loved—and Aunt Rody could love in those days—was a very, very bad man; he deceived her; it did not break her heart, or soften it; it made it hard. Unless we forgive, our hearts grow hard; she could not forgive; she has said that she does not know how to forgive. Only in forgiving do our hearts grow like God’s heart. He is always forgiving.”

“I forgave somebody once,” remembered Judith; “mother,” with a start, “I do not always forgive Aunt Rody when she is ugly to me; if I do not will I have a hard heart?”

“Yes. That spot toward Aunt Rody will grow harder