described.

'Is this your house, my little men?' he asked of the children--pretty
little rosy boys--who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against
the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me,
saying--

'You see now, and hear, and _feel_ for yourself that both the vision and
the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.'

And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same
on which I was now looking in the distance. Every now and then he made me
sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some
little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion
of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used
to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very
vagueness.

Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark
mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades. We came,
to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey,
pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained
steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor
mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried
bitterly, repeating, 'Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!' and so went on
weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone
bench some ten steps away from the tomb.

'Sit down beside me, my child,' said the grave man with the black eyes,
very kindly and gently. 'Now, what do you see there?' he asked, pointing