rrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then
thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each
brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood,
thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the
fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a
string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell's
unutterable torment."

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse
rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of
being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who
spelled God with a little g.

As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great
difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a
lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed
him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but
invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going
"down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became
pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he
would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say,
at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy
did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was
associating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a
body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell
what a sot he'd been!"

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more
tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical
conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy
couplets such as:

"Xerxes the Great did die
And so must you and I."

"As runs the glass
Man's life must pass."

"Thy life to mend
God's book attend."

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of
her favourites being:

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

"I in the burying-place may see
Graves shorter there than I.
From Death's arrest no age is free,
Young children, too, may die.

"My God, may such an awful sight
Awakening be to me;
Oh, that by early grace, I might
For death prepared be!"

She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to
Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second s