burned with a long snuff, as Shadrach Pratt and his wife sat beside the fire silent and tearful. There was an open Bible upon his lap, and he had been essaying to read, but the print looked blurred and confused; his voice was husky; and more than one tear had dropped upon the page where it said—“I will arise and go to my father,” and again where “his father fell upon his neck and kissed him;” and there was sorrow that night in the humble home.

The candle burned down, quivered in the socket, and then went out; the fire sank together again and again with a musical tinkle, and then ceased to give forth its warmth; but through the two round holes in the shutters the bright moonbeams shone, bathing the couple with their light, as slowly they knelt down, and Shadrach repeated some words, stopping long upon that impressive clause—“As we forgive them that trespass against us.”

“And you’ll leave the back door unfastened, Mary?” whispered Shadrach.

Mrs Pratt nodded.

“And forget the past if she should come?”

“Ah, me! ah, me! my poor girl!” cried the mother, thoroughly heart-broken, and for the first time since her child forsook her home showing any emotion; “what have we done that we should be her judges?”

The moonbeams shone brightly in as the couple rose, and after listening for a moment at the stair foot, Shadrach walked to the back door, opened it, uttered a cry, and then fell upon his knees; for there, upon the cold snow, with her cheek resting upon the threshold, lay the lost one of the flock—cold, pale, and motionless, but with her hands outstretched, and clasped together, as if praying for forgiveness. Stretched upon the cold snow by the door she had stolen from two years before; lying where she had crept, with trembling hands, and quivering, fevered lips, whispering to herself that she would die there, for she dared ask no entrance.

Need the story be told of that Christmas-day, and of the joy in that poor man’s home—of the sick one weeping in her mother’s arms—of the welcome given to one the world called lost! I trow not; but let us skip another year, and then stand in the same room, in the same place, and at the same hour, as with a bright light in his humble, ordinary face, Shadrach Pratt, a man not addicted to quoting Scripture, takes his homely wife’s hand, and whispers—

“More than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.”

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