Page:Her Benny - Silas K Hocking (Warne, 1890).djvu/84

60 if ripening for a fairer country, and for a purer and nobler life. Not that she ailed anything. True, she had a little hacking cough now and then, and when she lay asleep a pink spot would glow on either cheek; but nothing more than that.

"Speretual things," mused Joe Wrag one night, as he sat in the door of his hut looking into the fire, "are speretually discerned, an' I b'lieve that child 'as rale speretual discernment: she looks a mighty sight deeper than we thinks she do, that's my opinion. I should like to get howld o' all that passes through her purty little noddle, the little hangel—bless her! As for the boy, 'e's a little hanimal. I reckon the passons would call him a materialist. I don't b'lieve 'e b'lieves nothing but what 'e sees. No speretual insight in 'im—not a bit. P'r'haps he's like me, don't belong to the elect. Ah, me! I wonder what the likes o' us was born for?"

And Joe went out, and heaped more fuel on the fire by way of diverting his thoughts from a subject that was always painful to him. But when he came back and sat down again, and the fire before him blazed up with fiercer glow, the thoughts returned, and would not be driven away. "Bless her!" he said. "She sees in the fire only woods, an' meadows, an' mountains, an' streams; an' I only see the yawning caverns o' hell. An' to think I must burn in a fire a thousan' times bigger an' hotter than that for ever and ever without a single moment's ease; scorchin' on