ast morsel with him, would even touch his person, much
less allow him, when thus plague-stricken, to take shelter under their
roof. Such are the effects of selfishness, when it is opposed only by
the force of those natural qualities that are not elevated into a sense
of duty by clear and profound views of Christian truth. It is one thing
to perform a kind action from constitutional impulse, and another to
perform it as a fixed duty, perhaps contrary to that impulse.

Jemmy, on finding himself avoided like a Hebrew leper of old, silently
left the school, and walked on without knowing whither he should
ultimately direct his steps. He thought of his friend the priest, but
the distance between him and his place of abode was greater, he felt,
than his illness would permit him to travel. He walked on, therefore,
in such a state of misery as can scarcely be conceived, much less
described. His head ached excessively, an intense pain shot like
death-pangs through his lower back and loins, his face was flushed, and
his head giddy. In this state he proceeded, without money or friends;
without a house to shelter him, or a bed on which to lie, far from
his own relations, and with the prospect of death, under circumstances
peculiarly dreadful, before him! He tottered on, however, the earth, as
he imagined, reeling under him; the heavens, he thought, streaming with
fire, and the earth indistinct and discolored. Home, the paradise of the
absent--home, the heaven of the affections--with all its tenderness and
blessed sympathies, rushed upon his heart. His father's deep but quiet
kindness, his mother's sedulous love; his brothers, all that they had
been to him--these, with their thousand heart-stirring associations,
started into life before him again and again. But he was now ill, and
the mother--Ah! the enduring sense of that mother's love placed her
brightest, and strongest, and tenderest, in the far and distant group
which his imagination bodied forth.

"Mother!" he exclaimed--"Oh, mother, why--why did I ever lave you?
Mother! the son you loved is dyin' without a kind word, lonely and
neglected, in a strange land! Oh, my own mother! why did I ever lave
you?"

The conflict between his illness and his affections overcame him; he
staggered--he grasped as if for assistance at the vacant air--he fell,
and lay for some time in a state of insensibility.

The season was then that of midsummer, and early meadows were falling
before the scy