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LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY. 117 big psalter open in his hands, singing with all his childish might, his face a little uplifted, happily; and as he sang, a long ray of sunshine crept in and, slanting through a golden pane of a stained glass window, brightened the falling hair about his young head. His mother, as she looked at him across the church, felt a thrill pass through her heart, and a prayer rose in it too,—a prayer that the pure, simple happiness of his childish soul might last, and that the strange, great fortune which had fallen to him might bring no wrong or evil with it. There were many soft, anxious thoughts in her tender heart in those new days. ‘Oh, Ceddie!” she had said to him the evening before, as she hung over him in saying good-night, before he went away; "oh, Ceddie, dear, | wish for your sake I was very clever and could say a great many wise things! But only be good, dear, only be brave, only be kind and true always, and then you will never hurt any one, so long as you live, and you may help many, and the big world may be better because my little child was born. And that is best of all, Ceddie,—it is better than everything else, that the world should be a little better because a man has lived—even ever so little better, dearest.” | And on his return to the Castle, Fauntleroy had repeated her words to his grandfather. “And I thought about you when she said that,” he ended; "and I told her that was the way the world was because you had lived, and I was going to try if I could be like you.” ‘And what did she say to that?” asked his lordship, a trifle uneasily. ‘She said that was right, and we must always look for good in people and try to be like it.” Perhaps it was this the old man remembered as he glanced through the divided folds of the red curtain of his pew. Many
