Barnaby looked
upward, and laughed with all his heart.
But it was a day he usually devoted to a long ramble, and one of the
dogs--the ugliest of them all--came bounding up, and jumping round him
in the fulness of his joy. He had to bid him go back in a surly tone,
and his heart smote him while he did so. The dog retreated; turned
with a half-incredulous, half-imploring look; came a little back; and
stopped.
It was the last appeal of an old companion and a faithful friend--cast
off. Barnaby could bear no more, and as he shook his head and waved his
playmate home, he burst into tears.
'Oh mother, mother, how mournful he will be when he scratches at the
door, and finds it always shut!'
There was such a sense of home in the thought, that though her own eyes
overflowed she would not have obliterated the recollection of it, either
from her own mind or from his, for the wealth of the whole wide world.
Chapter 47
In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mercies to mankind, the power
we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest trials must ever
occupy the foremost place; not only because it supports and upholds
us when we most require to be sustained, but because in this source of
consolation there is something, we have reason to believe, of the divine
spirit; something of that goodness which detects amidst our own evil
doings, a redeeming quality; something which, even in our fallen nature,
we possess in common with the angels; which had its being in the old
time when they trod the earth, and lingers on it yet, in pity.
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