ray shadow, a spirit of gloom, stubbornly
imprisoning another spirit that would have been kind if it could have
escaped. But the little boy drew near to him, and found him curiously
companionable. Where once he had shunned him, he now went freely to the
study with his lessons or his storybook, or for talk of any little matter.
His grandfather, it seemed, could understand many things which so old a
man could scarcely have been expected to understand. In token of this
there would sometimes creep over his brown old face a soft light that made
it seem as if there must still be within him somewhere the child he had
once been; as if, perhaps, he looked into the little boy as into a mirror
that threw the sunlight of his own boyhood into his time-worn face. Side
by side, before the old man's fire, they would talk or muse, since they
were friendly enough to be silent if they liked. Only one confidence the
little boy could not bring himself to make: he could not tell the old man
that he no longer felt hard toward him, as once he had done, for his
coldness to his father; that he had divined--and felt a great shame
for--the true reason of that coldness. But he thought the old man must
understand without words. It was hardly a matter to be talked of.

About his other affairs, especially his early imaginings and difficulties,
he was free to talk; about coming to the Feet, and the Front Room, and
being washed in the blood, and born again--matters that made the old man
wish their intimacy had not been so long delayed.

But now they made up for lost time. Patiently and ably he taught the
little boy those truths he needed to know; to seek for eternal life
through the atoning blood of the Saviour, whose part it had been to
purchase our redemption from God's wrath by his death on Calvary. Of other
matters more technical: of how the love that God of necessity has for His
own infinitely perfect being is the reason and the measure of the hatred
he has for sin. Above all did he teach the little boy how to pray for the
grace of effectual calling, in order that, being persuaded of his sin and
misery, he might thereafter partake of justification, adoption,
sanctification, and those several benefits which, in this life, do either
accompany or flow from them. They looked forward with equal eagerness to
the day when he should become a great and good man, preaching the gospel
of the crucified Son to spellbound throngs.

[Illustration: "They looked f