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Twelve o’clock pealed from the mighty tongue of the time-recorder, and then the white-robed angel of death knocked at the door of two young human hearts, in the great city.

The tide of golden hair flowed over the white pillows of crimson-draperied couch. Shaded lamps poured their dim, silvery glances upon bright flowers and circling vines, the cunning workmanship of fingers in far-off lands, which lay among the soft groundwork of the rich carpet, while small white fingers glided caressingly among the golden hair; and white faces, wild with sorrow, bent over the rigid features of the dying child, and tears, such only as flow from the heart’s deepest and bitterest fountains, fell upon the cold forehead and paling lips, as the lids swept back for a moment from her blue eyes, and the light from her spirit broke for the last time into them; the lips upon which the death-seal was ready to be laid, opened; and clear and joyous through the hushed room rang the words, “I am coming! I am coming!” and the next moment the cold, beautiful clay was all which was left to the mourners.

The other, at whose heart the death-angel knocked, lay in one corner of an old and dilapidated room, on a pallet of straw. No soft hand wandered caressingly among his dark locks, or cooled with its cold touch the fever of his forehead. The dim, flickering rays of the tallow candle wandered over the features now grown stark and rigid with the death-chill. No grief-printed face bent in anguish above him; no eye watched for the latest breath; no ear for the dying word; but through the half-open door, came to the ear of the dying boy the coarse laugh of the inebriate–the jest of the vile, and the frightful blasphemies of those whose way is the way of death.

None saw the last life-light, as it broke into the dark, spiritual eyes of the boy. None saw the smile that played like the light around the lips of a seraph, about his blue and cold lips, as they spoke exceeding joyfully, “Father! Father, I have called and you have heard me; I am coming to you, coming now; for the angels beckon me;” and the pale clay on that sunken pallet was all that remained of the boy.

Together they met, those two children who had stood together in the earthly courts of the Most High, and whom the angel had simultaneously called from the earth, beneath the shining battlements of “the city of God.” The white wings of the warden-angels, who stood on its watch-towers, were slowly folded together, and back rolled the massive gates from the walls of jasper; and with the great “Godlight” streaming outward, and amid the sound of archangel’s harp and seraph’s lyre, the ministering angels came forth. They did not ask the child-spirits there, if their earthly homes had been among the high and the honourable; they did not ask them if broad lands had been their heritage, and sparkling coffers their portion; if their paths had lain by pleasant waters, and animals followed their biddings; but alike they led them–she, the daughter of wealth and earthly splendour, whose forehead the breezes might not visit too roughly, and whose pathway had been bordered with flowers and gilded with sunshine; and he, the heir of poverty, whose portion had been want, and his inalienable heritage, suffering; whose path had known no pleasant places; whose life had had no brightness within that glorious city. They placed bright crowns, alike woven from the fragrant branches of the far-spreading “Tree of Life,” around their spirit-brows; they decked them alike in white robes, whose lustre many ages shall not dim; alike they placed in their hands the harps whose music shall roll for ever over (sic) the the hills of jasper; and alike they pointed them to the gleaming battlements, to the still skies over whose surface the shadow of a cloud hath never floated; to the “many mansions” which throw the shadow of their shining portals on the rippling waters of the “River of Life,” and to far more of glory “which it hath never entered into the heart of man to conceive of,” and told them they should “go no more out for ever.”