t was meant,
and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some
difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black
cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end
disappearing in the gloom.

My mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life; it marked a
change at once and for life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised
upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made.
He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in
tears, himself outwardly unmoved.[11] But from that time dates an
entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching,
because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that
his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even
altered--I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy
Scriptures, but was "wise unto salvation"--but it strengthened and
clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God
as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got
a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and
with a fresh power--with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the
living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and
his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled; but fuel was
heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that {ti thermon
pragma}, burned with a new ardor; indeed had he not found an outlet for
his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties
have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendor and
combustion, or dwindled into lethargy.[12]

[11] I have been told that _once_ in the course of the sermon his
voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.

[12] There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and
matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young,
at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean,
what think ye o' the lad?" "_It's maist o't tinsel wark_,"
said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine
sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached
in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the
first word, "_It's a' gowd noo_."

The manse became silent; we lived and slept and played under the shadow
of that death, and we saw, or rather felt