fference?' asked Mrs. Dallas helplessly.

'It was nominal merely.'

'And now?'

'Now it is not nominal; it is real. I have come to know and love my
Master. I am His for life and death; and now His commands seem the
pleasantest things in the world to me.'

'But you obeyed them always?'

'No, mamma, I did not. I obeyed nothing, in the last resort, but my own
supreme will.'

'But, Pitt, you say you have come to know; what time has there been for
any such change?'

'Not much time,' he replied; 'and I cannot tell how it is; but it
seemed as if, so soon as I had given up the struggle and yielded,
scales fell from my eyes. I cannot tell how it was; but all at once I
seemed to see the beauty of Christ, which I never saw before; and,
mamma, the sight has filled me with joy. Nothing now to my mind is more
reasonable than His demands, or more delightful than yielding obedience
to them.'

'Demands? what demands?' said Mrs. Dallas.

Her son repeated the words with which the twelfth chapter of Romans
begins.

'"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,
which is your reasonable service; and be not conformed to this world."'

'But, my dear, that means'--

'It means all.'

'How all?'

'There is nothing more left to give, when this sacrifice is presented.
It covers the whole ground. The sacrifice is a living sacrifice, but it
gives all to God as entirely as the offering that imaged it went up in
smoke and flame.'

'What sacrifice imaged it?'

'The burnt-sacrifice of old. That always meant consecration.'

'How do you know? You are not a clergyman.'

Pitt smiled again, less brightly. 'True, mother, but I have been
studying all this for years, in the Bible and in the words of others
who _were_ clergymen; and now it is all plain before me. It became so
as soon as I was willing to obey it.'

'And what are you going to do?'

'Do? I cannot say yet. I am a soldier but just enlisted, and do not
know where my orders will place me or what work they will give me. Only
I _have_ enlisted; and that is what I wanted you to know at once.
Mother, it is a great honour to be a soldier of Christ.'

'I should think,--if I did not see you and hear your voice,--I should
certainly think I heard a Methodist talking. I suppose that is the way
they do.'

'Did you ever hear one talk, mother?'

'No, and do not want to hear one, even if it were m