Little Alice's Palace Part 4

"'I'll tell you something stranger still about yourself. You'll be a beautiful b.u.t.terfly.'

"The caterpillar laughed at the idea; but, as she turned around and saw the eggs upon the leaf all hatched into little crawling caterpillars, she was forced to believe what the lark had said concerning herself; and she went about as happy as could be, telling everybody what a glorious change would come to her after she had folded herself in her close chrysalis."

The minister told Lolly that this caterpillar in the chrysalis was like us worms of the dust when lying in the narrow grave enshrouded in our death-robes; and that, like as the caterpillar bursts his darksome bonds and soars away upon b.u.t.terfly pinions, so shall we come forth from the tomb on the resurrection day, and with angel-wings mount upward to the world of light and peace. Then he read a few verses to her from that beautiful account of the rising from the dead, in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

Lolly would lie upon her sick-bed and fasten her earnest eyes upon him as he read and as he spoke so sweetly to her of the other life; and then she would look away through the open window to the heavens above, and seem to see the face of her Father, who was drawing her slowly to himself.