with those offices of
respect to which she had earned her right by three quarters of a century
of humble, patient love and faithful service. My chest was packed, and
on the morrow I must sail for the ends of the earth; but she knew
nothing of that. All that afternoon we talked together as we had never
talked before; and many an injury that my indignant tears had kept fresh
and sticky was "dried" in the warmth of her earnest, anxious
peace-making, and "rubbed out" then and there. No page of my inditing
could be pure enough to record it all; but is it not written in the Book
of Life, among the regrets and the forgivenesses, the confessions and
the consolations and the hopes?

The last word I ever uttered to Aunt Judy was a careful, loving, pious
lie. She said, "Won't you come ag'in to-morrow, son, and see de poor ole
woman?" And I replied, "O yes, Auntie!"--though I well knew that, even
as I spoke, I was looking into the wise truth of those patient, tender
eyes for the last time in this world. The sun was going down as we
parted,--that sun has never risen again for me.

In June, 1850, on board a steamboat in the Sacramento River, I received
the very Bible I had first learned to read in, sitting on her lap by the
kitchen fire,--in the beginning was the Word. She was dead; and, dying,
she had sent it me, with her blessing,--at the end was the Word.

In August, 1852, that Bible was tossed ashore from a wreck in an Indian
river, and by angels delivered at a mission school in the jungle, where
other heathens beside myself have doubtless learned from it the Word
that was, and is, and ever shall be. On the inside of the cover, sitting
on her lap by the kitchen fire, I had written, with appropriate
"pot-hooks and hangers," AUNT JUDY.

Such her quiet consummation and renown!

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.

VII.

BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH.

One of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical
religion"; and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters.
But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that
indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the
most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all
religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that
people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be
perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious;
but, in point of fact, the greate