t
produced a conviction upon the mind of Mary that the spoiled child was
not beyond hope of redemption. She laid the case before her parents,
and, with the aid of her father, obtained a reluctant consent from her
mother that one more trial might be given the recreant Philip.

Even without this Mary would have gained her point, for on the next
morning Philip, burning with fever, was unable to leave his bed.

A severe attack of typhoid ensued.

When Philip St. Leger, after a dangerous illness of many weeks, became
convalescent, he was a changed person. Not alone through the influence
of Mary, but Colonel Selby, and especially his wife, were brought to
realize how prone they had been to reproach and condemn without having
made the slightest efforts to reform. A neglected, untutored,
un-Christianized young man had been placed in their care--was it too
late to redeem the past? No effort was left untried, though exercised
with the greatest delicacy to bring the young heathen's mind to a proper
state of its former unhealthfulness, of its present pressing needs.

Mary read to him biographies of the good and great. She read ennobling
works of poetry and counsel. She brought before his mind by example how
superior was earnestness to trivialty, strict integrity to knavery and
falsehood, goodness and piety to wickedness and infidelity. As she read
and commented, her voice became to Philip as the voice of an angel. Her
work was indeed accomplished when, after having listened to her
rendering of St. Paul's grand epistles, there sprang up in his heart,
first: "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian;" then this full,
heart-swelling sympathy with the Apostle's words:

"For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any creature, shall be able to separate us from
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

CHAPTER V.

THE MISSIONARY'S RETROSPECT.

Though Philip St. Leger would have done, in almost all things, as Mary
Selby directed, upon one certain point he was inflexible. This was upon
the subject of immersion; he would not go down into the waters of Lake
Sunapee, following the custom of the Newbergians.

During his boyhood his mother had been a member of the Presbyterian
society; latterly, for some good reason or other, she had made a move
into the Episcopal; whether through whim for popular