shadows which garrison the chapter it has left behind.

No man loves to linger by his scaffold, though it be cheated of its last
adornment, and though no eye behold its grinning outline but its own.
For there are shadowy scaffolds, and invisible executioners, sitting at
our own boards and eating of our own bread, discernible only in a glass.
Our own Sheriffs and Executioners are we all.

Swift in the wake of sorrow came the unromantic form of toil. Thank God!
Work is sorrow's cure, its hands like the hands of an enemy, but its
voice the voice of an Eternal friend. For duty is God's midwife, sent to
deliver the soul that travails in its anguish.

It was but the day after Margaret had passed from out my door, girding
it as she went with crape, invisible to other eyes, that I was called to
Archie McCormack's house. The day was bright and clear, but I knew it
not--for in this doth sorrow make us like to God, that then the darkness
and the light are both alike.

For some months past, my old precentor had been failing fast. The doctor
said it was his heart, but none of us believed it; for his heart had
grown larger, stronger, happier with every passing year. Its outer life
might perish if it would, but its inner life was renewed day by day.
Indeed, his soul's second harvest seemed to take the form of
cheerfulness, the scantiest crop of all in the stern seasons of his
earlier life. Even merriment sought to bloom before the frost should
come.

The very day before Margaret and I began our life's Lenten season, I had
been to see him, little thinking that my next visit was to be the last.
My own heart was full of that joy whose overflow Margaret had entrusted
to its care--which is a great gift to a minister, this gift of gladness,
seeking as he does to irrigate the thirsty plains of life about him.

"How is my precentor to-day?" I asked as I sat down at the blazing
hearth. He was lying on the couch, the fourth gradation--the field, the
veranda, the room, the couch, the bed, the grave--thus the promotion
runs!

"I'm by or'nar glad to see ye," he replied, evasively. "The auld freens
are the best."

"That's good, Archie, the old friends are glad to hear it. They hear it
seldom from Scottish lips, however hopefully they suspect it."

"We're nae muckle given to compliments--I'll grant ye that. But whiles
we think; an' whiles we speak--an' whiles we wunna. But I'm no backward
in tellin' a man gin I care for him. Noo, I was say