, and was
still falling, and the wind that roared and whistled, as it piled it up
in the hollows and on the hill-sides, helped to make him content to stay
at home and rest.

It was rest he needed. He was not ill--only tired, so tired that he did
not care during this time of leisure, to pursue the studies that he
loved so well, and, for the most part, David read to him. These were
happy days to David. Generally in the quiet afternoons, when the
children were at school, they were down-stairs in mamma's room, and
mamma listened to the reading, too, with little Mary playing out and in
of the room beside them. But on the long evenings they usually sat
up-stairs in the study, with mamma coming up to see them only now and
then. Sometimes there was no reading, and David went on with his
lessons as usual, while his father lay on the sofa with closed eyes,
thinking over the wonderful truths he wished to speak to the people when
the Sabbath came round again.

Sometimes when the children, and even the mother, weary with the day's
cares and labours, had gone to rest, David sat with his father far into
the night. A prey to the restless wakefulness which, for the time,
seems worse to bear than positive illness, Mr Inglis dreaded his bed,
and David was only too glad to be allowed to sit with him. Sometimes he
read to him, but oftener they talked, and David heard a great many
things about his father's life, that he never would have heard but for
this time. His father told him about his early home, and his brothers
and sisters, and their youthful joys and sorrows--how dearly they had
loved one another, and how he had mourned their loss. He told him about
his mamma in her girlhood, as she was when he first knew her, how they
had loved one another, and how she had blessed all his life till now,
and nothing that his father told him filled David's heart with such
wonder and pleasure, as did this. And when he added, one night, that to
him--her first-born son--his mother must always trust, as her strength
and "right hand," he could only find voice to say "Of course, papa," for
the joyful throbbing of his heart. David used to tell Violet and Jem
some things that his father spoke about, at such times, but this he
never told. He mused over it often in the dark, with smiles and happy
tears upon his face, and told himself that his mother's strength and
"right hand," he would ever be, but it never came into his mind that the
time might