e. Penitence must kneel
and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate
will never open.

DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT.

That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable
friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded
gentlemen--Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne--and a
withered gentlewoman whose name was the widow Wycherly. They were all
melancholy old creatures who had been unfortunate in life, and whose
greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their
graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous
merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now
little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best
years and his health and substance in the pursuit of sinful pleasures
which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout and divers
other torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined
politician, a man of evil fame--or, at least, had been so till time
had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation and made
him obscure instead of infamous. As for the widow Wycherly, tradition
tells us that she was a great beauty in her day, but for a long while
past she had lived in deep seclusion on account of certain scandalous
stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is
a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old
gentlemen--Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne--were
early lovers of the widow Wycherly, and had once been on the point of
cutting each other's throats for her sake. And before proceeding
farther I will merely hint that Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests
were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves, as is not
infrequently the case with old people when worried either by present
troubles or woeful recollections.

"My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be
seated, "I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little
experiments with which I amuse myself here in my study."

If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must have been a very
curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber festooned with
cobwebs and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood
several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with
rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos, and the upper with
little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over th