It was a beautiful winter-morning. The new fallen snow lay light and fleecy about the porch and on the evergreens before the door, and cushioned and covered all the thousand minute branches of the trees till they stood forth as if traced in silver on the deep blue of the sky. A sparkling, dazzling scene it was, which lay spread out before the windows of that comfortable family parlor, where the morning sunshine and the blazing wood-fire on the hearth seemed to feel a generous rivalry as to which should be most inspiriting.

There were children in the room, a merry group of all sizes, from the boy of ten years old to the little one whose first uncertain footsteps were coaxed forth by a lure, and cheered onward like a triumphal progress by admiring brothers and sisters. It was the morning of New-Year's day, which had always been held as a high festival in the family, as it is in many families of New England, all the merriment and festal observance elsewhere bestowed upon Christmas having been transferred by Puritan preferences to this holiday.

It was just the weather for a holiday—brisk and bracing. Sleigh-bells were jingling merrily, as the deep drifts of the road having been overcome, one after another of the families of the neighborhood had commenced their round, bearing baskets filled with gifts and pleasant tokens of remembrance, with the customary wishes and salutations of the day.

The young mother sat in the group of happy children, but she did not smile on them. Her hand rested fondly on one little head and another, as they pressed to her side with eager question or exclamation. She drew the little one with a quick, earnest clasp to her heaving bosom. Her tremulous lips refused to obey the impulse of her will; she left Edward's question unanswered, and abruptly placing Willie in the arms of his careful nurse, she rushed away from the gladness she could not bear, to the solitude of her own chamber. There she fell upon her knees and covered her face, while the storm of sorrow she had striven so hard to stem, swept over her. Amid groans of agony, came forth the low murmur—"'Write his children fatherless, and his wife a widow!' Oh, my God, why must this be? His children fatherless, his wife a widow!"

Soon came the quick sobs which told that the overcharged heart which had seemed ready to burst, had found temporary relief in tears; then followed the low moans of calmer endurance, and the widow's heart sunk back into all it had yet found of peace under this great bereavement, though it had been months since the blow fell; the peace of submission—"Not my will, but thine, O God, be done!" This time it expressed itself in the quaint words of Herbert;

"Do thou thy holy will;—
I will lie still."

Then came the mother's habitual recollection of her children. They must not bear the weight of this great sorrow in the days of their tender youth, lest the hopefulness and energy they would certainly need in after life should be discouraged and disheartened out of them. Edward is naturally too reflective; he dwells too much on his loss, and evidently begins to ponder already how so many children are to be taken care of without a father. Sensitive Mary feels too deeply the shadow of the cloud which has come over her home; her face reflects back her mother's sadness.

So, rising, the mother rang the bell, and gave directions that the children should be prepared for a visit to their grandfather's, and that the sleigh should be brought to the door.

"They must go," thought she, "I cannot bear them about me. I must spend this day alone;" and she bade Mary replenish the fire, and seated herself in the arm-chair by the window. What a sickness fell upon the sad heart as the eye roved over the cheerful winter landscape! Here were the hurryings to and fro of congratulation, the gay garments, such as she and hers had laid aside, the merry chiming of the many-toned sleigh-bells, all so familiar to her ear that she knew who was passing, even if she had not looked up. Here is Thomas with the sleigh for the children, and, preceding it, is Ponto in his highest glee—now he dashes forward with a few quick bounds, and turns to bark a challenge at Thomas and the horses—now he plunges into a snow-drift, and mining his way through it, emerges on the other side to shake himself vigorously and bark again.

Has Ponto forgotten his master? Ponto, who lies so often at his mistress's feet, and looks up wistfully into her face, as if he understood much, but would like to ask more, and seems, with his low whine, to put the question—Why, when his master went away so many months ago, he had never come back again:—Ponto, who would lie for hours, when he could steal an access to them, beside the trunks which came home unaccompanied by their owner, and which still stood in a closed room, which was to the household like the silent chamber of death. There had been for the mourner a soothing power in Ponto's dumb sympathy, even when, with the caprice of suffering, she could not bear the obtrusiveness of human pity.

Out trooped the merry, noisy children, well equipped with caps and comforters. Good Thomas arranged them on the seats, and wrapped the buffalo-robes about them, and encircling his special darling, a prattling little girl of three years old, with his careful arm, away they went, down the hill and out of sight.

With a sigh of relief, the mother drew her chair to the hearth, and resolved, for that one day, to give over the struggle, and let sorrow have its way. She dwelt on all the circumstances of the change, which so suddenly had darkened her life. She permitted her thoughts to run upon themes from which she had sedulously kept them, thus indulging, and as it were, nursing her grief. She recalled the thoughtful love which had been hers till it seemed as natural and as necessary to her as the air she breathed. She had been an indulged wife, constantly cared for, and lavishly supplied with everything that heart could wish. The natural sensitiveness of her temperament had been heightened by too much tenderness; she had been encouraged to cling like a vine, and to expect support from without herself. She was still young and beautiful. She was accustomed to be loved and admired by many, but that was nothing to her in comparison with the calm unvarying estimation in which she had been held by one faithful heart. How was she to live without this essential element of her life?

Then the darkened future of her life rushed over her like an overwhelming flood: the cares and duties which were henceforward to devolve on her alone; the children who were never to know any other parent but herself; never to know any stronger restraints from evil or incentives to good than she in her feebleness could exert over them. What would become of her boys as they grew older, and needed a father's wise counsels? She saw with grief that she was even less qualified than most mothers to exercise the sole government and providence over a family. She had been too much indulged—too entirely screened from contact with the world's rough ways.

How were the wants of her large family to be provided for with the lessened income she could now command? Pecuniary loss had followed close upon her great bereavement, and though this constituted but a small element in her sorrow, yet now that it came before her on the morning of this new year, it added yet another shade to the "horror of great darkness" which encompassed her. She knew that it must have a direct bearing upon her welfare, and that of her family.

Then she reverted to the New Year's Day of last year; the little surprises she had helped to plan; the liberal expenditure by which she had sent pleasure, for one day at least, into the dwellings of the poor, her generous gifts to her servants, which it had been a pleasant study to adapt to their several tastes and wants; the dependencies, near and remote, which she had used as channels for conveying a measure of happiness to many a heart. Now there must be an end to all this; she could be generous no more. Even her children, partly from her pre-occupied mind, had no gifts provided for them to-day. Was she not a "widow and desolate?"

"Desolate, desolate!" she repeated in bitterness of soul. She paused. A voice within her seemed to say—"Now she that is a widow and desolate trusteth in God." A moment after there came into her mind yet another verso, "And none of them that trust in Him shall be DESOLATE."

Could it be that she remembered the passage aright? Her Bible lay open on the table before her. She had that morning earnestly sought strength from it, and from communion with God before she could nerve herself to meet her children, and bear their reiterated salutations, heart-rending to her, "Happy New Year, mother"—"Mother, dear mother, I wish you a Happy New Year."

Now as she drew it towards her, and turned over its pages to verify the exactness of the words, it soon opened to the blessed thirty-fourth psalm, which has proved to many an anchor of hope when they cried to God "out of the depths."

"I will bless the Lord at all times;" Oh, surely not!—How could any one bless the Lord at such a time as this? Yet there it stood:—

"I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth." If others could do this, and had done it, God helping her, she would do it too. She, too, would bless the Lord, and speak his praises.

"My soul shall make her boast in the Lord." A feeling of exultation began to rise within her. Something was yet left to her. Her earthly "boast" was indeed broken; but why might not she, too, "make her boast in the Lord"?

Touched with living light, verse by verse stood out before her, as written by the finger of a present God. Humbled to the earth, overpowered by deep self-abasement and contrition of soul, she clung as with a death-grasp to the words that were bearing her triumphantly through these dark waves.

"They looked unto Him and were lightened." Was not her darkness already broken as by a beam from His face?

"This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his troubles."

"The angel of the Lord encampeth about them that fear Him, and delivereth them."

"The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears are open unto their cry."

"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all."

Who was this, that, under these comfortable words, looked peacefully upward? It was one who was learning to trust God; taught it, as most of us are, by being placed in circumstances where there is nothing else to trust.

It is not for us to portray all that passes in the human soul when it is brought into vivid communion with its Maker. It is enough for us to know that this sorrowful heart was made to exult in God, even in the calm consciousness of its irretrievable loss; and that before the sun of a day specially consecrated to grief had attained its meridian, the mourner came cheerfully forth from her place of retirement, while a chant, as of angelic voices, breathed through the temple of her sorrowful soul, even over its broken altar.

"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in Him."

"Oh, fear the Lord, ye his saints; for there is no want to them that fear Him."

The group of banished little ones was recalled, but while the messenger was gone for them, the mother in the strength of her new-found peace, had brought forth from that closed chamber the gifts which the fond father had designed for each of his children, and had spread them out in fair array on the parlor table. So it was New Year's Day to the children after all.

The trust of that mother in the widow's God was never put to shame. Her children grew up around her, and hardly realized that they had not father and mother both in the one parent who was all in all to them. She was efficient and successful in all her undertakings. Her home, with its overshadowing trees, its rural abundance and hearty hospitalities, lives in the hearts of many as their brightest embodiment of an ideal, a cheerful, Christian home. The memory of that mother, dispensing little kindnesses to everybody within her reach, is a heritage to her children worth thousands of gold and silver. Truly, "they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing."