ou'd just tell
me in short order, father."

"O, read it for yourself," said Mr. H., as he pushed the book towards
the boy, for it was to be confessed that he perceived at this moment
that he had not himself received any particularly luminous impression,
though of course he thought it was owing to his own want of
comprehension.

Mr. H. leaned back in his rocking chair, and on his own private account
began to speculate a little as to what he really should think the verse
might mean, supposing he were at all competent to decide upon it. "'Make
to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,'" says he:
"that's money, very clearly. How am I to make friends with it or of it?
Receive me into everlasting habitations: that's a singular kind of
expression. I wonder what it means. Dr. Scott makes some very good
remarks about it--but somehow I'm not exactly clear." It must be
remarked that this was not an uncommon result of Mr. H.'s critical
investigations in this quarter.

Well, thoughts will wander; and as he lay with his head on the back of
his rocking chair, and his eyes fixed on the flickering blaze of the
coal, visions of his wet tramp in the city, and of the lonely garret he
had been visiting, and of the poor woman with the pale, discouraged
face, to whom he had carried warmth and comfort, all blended themselves
together. He felt, too, a little indefinite creeping chill, and some
uneasy sensations in his head like a commencing cold, for he was not a
strong man, and it is probable his long, wet walk was likely to cause
him some inconvenience in this way. At last he was fast asleep, nodding
in his chair.

He dreamed that he was very sick in bed, that the doctor came and went,
and that he grew sicker and sicker. He was going to die. He saw his wife
sitting weeping by his pillow--his children standing by with pale and
frightened faces; all things in his room began to swim, and waver, and
fade, and voices that called his name, and sobs and lamentations that
rose around him, seemed far off and distant in his ear. "O eternity,
eternity! I am going--I am going," he thought; and in that hour, strange
to tell, not one of all his good deeds seemed good enough to lean
on--all bore some taint or tinge, to his purified eye, of mortal
selfishness, and seemed unholy before the ALL PURE. "I am going," he
thought; "there is no time to stay, no time to alter, to balance
accounts; and I know not what I am, but I know, O Jesus, what