But gathering up his quickly failing strength,
The dying soldier--dying victor--said:
'Hush! for the angels call the muster roll!
I wait to hear my name!'

They spoke no more.
What need to speak again? for now full well
They knew on whom his dying hopes were fixed,
And what his prospects were. So, hushed and still,
They, kneeling, watched.

And presently a smile,
As of most thrilling and intense delight,
Played for a moment on the soldier's face,
And with his one last breath he whispered 'Here!'

'_I have sinned! What shall I do?_' cries this despairing soul at the
beginning of my Bible.

'_The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!_'
answers the man who leaned upon the Saviour's breast and gazed full into
the thorn-crowned face of the Crucified.

'_That is what I want!_' exclaims the man at Malabar, speaking, not for
himself alone, but for each and all of us.

'_Those words are more golden than gold!_' says Miss Havergal, as she
orders them to be inscribed upon her tomb.

'_They are like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!_' cries Donald Menzies.

'_They are the sheet-anchor of my soul!_' Hedley Vicars tells his
sweetheart. And he is a very wise man who, in the straits of his
experience, stakes his faith upon that which such witnesses have tested
and have found sublimely true.

XV

SILAS WRIGHT'S TEXT

I

Silas Wright was deprived by sheer modesty of the honor of being
President of the United States. His is one of the truly Homeric figures
in American history. By downright purity of motive, transparency of
purpose, and the devotion of commanding powers to the public good, he
won for himself the honor, the love and the unbounded confidence of all
his fellows. It used to be said of him that he was as honest as any man
under heaven _or in it_. He might have aspired to any office to which it
was in America's power to call him. Only his extreme humility, and his
dread of impeding the promotion of his friends, kept him from rising to
a position in which his name would have taken its place with those of
Washington and Lincoln. But he refused almost every honor. 'He refused
cabinet appointments,' says Benton, in his _Thirty Years' View_. 'He
refused a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States;
he rejected instantly the nomination of 1844 for Vice-President; he
refused to be nominated for the Presidency. He spent as much time