matter," said Mr Craig, still smiling. "I am
on equal terms with them there; though I cannot say that the greatest
part of the pleasure I have in my work arises from the gain it is to me.
But why do you say it is a thankless work?"

Instead of answering directly, Aunt Elsie asked, a moment after:

"Are you always well received,--you and your books?"

"Oh, yes; in this part of the country, always,--quite as well as other
pedlars are, and sometimes far better, for my work's sake. I have been
in places where the reception I met with was something worse than cold.
But I now and then met, even in those places, some that welcomed me so
warmly for the work's sake I was doing as to make me little heed the
scoffs of the others."

"You are sent out by a society, I think?" said Aunt Elsie. "It is
mostly Bibles that you sell?"

"Yes; it's mostly Bibles that I carry with me."

There was a pause. The colporteur sat looking into the red embers, with
the smile on his face which Christie had found so attractive. In a
little while Aunt Elsie, not without some hesitation, said:

"And is all the time and trouble and money spent by this society worth
their while?"

Aunt Elsie would have been shocked had any one expressed a doubt of her
sincere respect for the Bible. Her respect was hereditary. Not one day
in her childhood or womanhood had passed in which she had not heard or
read some portion of the Holy Book. Nothing could have induced her to
part with one of the several Bibles that had been in her possession for
years. One had been hers when a girl at school, one had lain in her
seat at the kirk for many a year, and a third had lain on her
parlour-table and been used by her at family worship when she kept house
for herself. It would have seemed to her like sacrilege to let them
pass into other hands. That the superiority of the Scottish people over
all other nations (in which superiority she firmly believed) was in some
way owing to the influence of God's Word, read and understood, she did
not doubt. But her ideas of the matter were by no means satisfactory
even to herself. That the Bible, read and understood, should ever
change the mixed multitudes of her new and adopted country into a people
grave and earnest and steadfast for the right, was altogether beyond her
thought. The humble labours of this man, going about from house to
house, to place perhaps in careless or unwilling hands the Bible (God's
Word though sh