that shall show that holiness is the lost art, and that Christ is
the sunshine, and that the gospel helps a blind man to see, and that from
Pisgah and Mount Zion there is a better prospect than from the top of fifty
Adirondacks.

As for ourselves, save in rare and peculiar circumstances, good-bye to the
lecturing platform, while we try for the rest of our life to imitate the
minister who said, "This one thing I do!" There are exhilarations about
lecturing that one finds it hard to break from, and many a minister who
thought himself reformed of lecturing has, over-tempted, gone up to the
American Library or Boston Lyceum Bureau, and drank down raw, a hundred
lecturing engagements. Still, a man once in a while finds a new pair of
spectacles to look through.

Between Indianapolis and Dayton, on that wild, swift ride, we found a moral
which we close with--for the printer-boy with inky fingers is waiting for
this paragraph--Never take the last train when you can help it. Much of the
trouble in life is caused by the fact that people, in their engagements,
wait til' the last minute. The seven-o'clock train will take them to the
right place if everything goes straight, but in this world things are very
apt to go crooked. So you had better take the train that starts an hour
earlier. In everything we undertake let us leave a little margin. We tried,
jokingly, to persuade Captain Berry, when off Cape Hatteras, to go down and
get his breakfast, while we took his place and watched the course of the
steamer. He intimated to us that we were running too near the bar to allow
a greenhorn to manage matters just there. There is always danger in sailing
near a coast, whether in ship or in plans and morals. Do not calculate too
closely on possibilities. Better have room and time to spare. Do not take
the last train. Not heeding this counsel makes bad work for this world and
the next. There are many lines of communication between earth and heaven.
Men say they can start at any time. After a while, in great excitement,
they rush into the depot of mercy and find that the final opportunity has
left, and, behold! it is the last train!

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SEXTON.

King David, it is evident, once thought something of becoming a church
sexton, for he said, "I had rather be a doorkeeper," and so on. But he
never carried out the plan, perhaps because he had not the qualification.
It requires more talent in some respects to be sexton than t