A CHILDISH MIRACLE
One afternoon of a cold winter\'s day, when the sun shone forth with
chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their
mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a
little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and
was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were
familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the
style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round
little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet
flowers. The father of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is
important to say, was an excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of
man, a dealer in hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is
called the common-sense view of all matters that came under his
consideration. With a heart about as tender as other people\'s, he had a head
as hard and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the
iron pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother\'s character,
on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,--
a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her
imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of
matrimony and motherhood.