
child. At length Hetty dried her tears, and came and seated herself on a stool
by the side of the dying man, who had been placed at his length on the floor,
with his head supported by some coarse vestments that had been left in the
house.
    »Father -« she said - »you will let me call you father, though you say you
are not one - Father shall I read the bible to you - mother always said the
bible was good for people in trouble. She was often in trouble herself, and then
she made me read the bible to her - for Judith was n't as fond of the bible as I
am - and it always did her good. Many is the time I've known mother begin to
listen with the tears streaming from her eyes, and end with smiles and gladness.
Oh! father, you do n't know how much good the bible can do, for you've never
tried it - Now, I'll read a chapter, and it will soften your heart, as it
softened the hearts of the Hurons.«
    While poor Hetty had so much reverence for, and faith in, the virtues of the
bible, her intellect was too shallow to enable her fully to appreciate its
beauties, or to fathom its profound, and sometimes mysterious wisdom. That
instinctive sense of right, which appeared to shield her from the commission of
wrong, and even cast a mantle of moral loveliness and truth around her
character, could not penetrate abstrusities, or trace the nice affinities
between cause and effect, beyond their more obvious and indisputable connection,
though she seldom failed to see all the latter, and to defer to all their just
consequences. In a word, she was one of those who feel and act correctly,
without being able to give a logical reason for it, even admitting revelation as
her authority. Her selections from the bible, therefore, were commonly
distinguished by the simplicity of her own mind, and were oftener marked for
containing images of known and palpable things, than for any of the higher cast
of moral truths with which the pages of that wonderful book abound - wonderful,
and unequalled, even without referring to its divine origin, as a work replete
with the profoundest philosophy, expressed in the noblest language. Her mother,
with a connection that will probably strike the reader, had been fond of the
book of Job, and Hetty had, in a great measure, learned to read by the frequent
lessons she had received from the different chapters of this venerable and
sublime poem - now believed
