she used to carry for her children. She sits at home, too old to find
her way to the house of God; but while she sits there, all the past
comes back, and the children that forty years ago tripped around her
armchair with their griefs and joys and sorrows--those children are
gone now. Some caught up into a better realm, where they shall never
die, and others out in the broad world, testing the excellency of a
Christian mother's discipline. Her last days are full of peace; and
calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life
shall lift and let in the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and
youth, where the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow dim, and
the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the palm
of the immortal athlete!

THE CHILDREN'S PATRIMONY.

"Whose son art thou, thou young man?"--SAMUEL 17:58.

Never was there a more unequal fight than that between David and
Goliath. David five feet high; Goliath ten. David a shepherd boy,
brought up amid rural scenes; Goliath a warrior by profession. Goliath
a mountain of braggadocia; David a marvel of humility. Goliath armed
with an iron spear; David armed with a sling with smooth stones from
the brook. But you are not to despise these latter weapons. There was
a regiment of slingers in the Assyrian army and a regiment of slingers
in the Egyptian army, and they made terrible execution, and they could
cast a stone with as much precision and force as now can be hurled
shot or shell. The Greeks in their army had slingers who would throw
leaden plummets inscribed with the irritating words: "Take this!" So
it was a mighty weapon David employed in that famous combat.

A Jewish rabbi says that the probability is that Goliath was in such
contempt for David, that in a paroxysm of laughter he threw his head
back, and his helmet fell off, and David saw the uncovered forehead,
and his opportunity had come, and taking his sling and swinging it
around his head two or three times, and aiming at that uncovered
forehead, he crushed it in like an egg-shell. The battle over,

BEHOLD A TABLEAU:

King Saul sitting, little David standing, his fingers clutched into
the hair of decapitated Goliath. As Saul sees David standing there
holding in his hand the ghastly, reeking, staring trophy, evidence of
the complete victory over God's enemies, the king wonders what
parentage was honored by such heroism, and in my text he asks David