ery in the
change. It had then been all happiness and prosperity with that
household; a calm, grave, thoughtful, but happy father and husband; a
bright, amiable, affectionate mother and wife; a daughter, to his mind
the image of every thing that was sweet, and gentle, and tender--of
every thing that was gay, and sparkling, and cheerful; full of light and
life, and fancy, and hope. Now, there was a father in prison, deprived
of his greatest share of worldly prosperity, cast down from his station
in society, gloomy, desponding, suspicious, and, as it seemed to him,
hardly sane: a mother, irritable, capricious, peevish, yielding to
calamity, and lying on a bed of sickness, while the bright angel of his
love remained to nurse, and tend, and soothe the one parent, with a
heart torn and bleeding for the distresses of the other. "What have they
done to merit all this?" he asked himself. "What fault, what crime have
they committed to draw down such sorrows on their heads? None--none
whatever. Their lives had been spent in kindly acts and good deeds; they
had followed the precepts of the religion they professed; their lives
had been spent in doing service to their fellow-creatures, and making
all happy around them."

Then again, on the other hand, he saw the coarse, and the low, and the
base, and the licentious prosperous and successful, rising on the ruins
of the pure and the true. Wily schemes and villanous intrigues obtaining
every advantage, and honesty of purpose and rectitude of action
frustrated and cast down.

Marlow was no unbeliever--he was not even inclined to skepticism--but
his mind labored, not without humility and reverence, to see how it
could reconcile such facts with the goodness and providence of God.

"He makes the sun shine upon the just and the unjust, we are told," said
Marlow to himself; "but here the sun seems to shine upon the unjust
alone, and clouds and tempests hang about the just. It is very strange,
and even discouraging; and yet, all that we see of these strange,
unaccountable dispensations may teach us lessons for hereafter--may give
us the grandest confirmation of the grandest truth. There must be
another world, in which these things will be made equal--a world where
the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. We only see
in part, and the part we do not see must be the part which will
reconcile all the seeming contradictions between the justice and
goodness of God and the cour