ar it, except on Sundays?"

Our good reader will exclaim,--A bad young man! And yet we think our
good readers--nay, our best of readers--have shirked godly counsel over
and over, with very much the same promptitude. We all grow so weary with
the iteration of even the best of truths! we all love youth so much! we
all love the world so much! we all trust to an arm of flesh so much!

Not for a moment did the Doctor believe that his recreant son pondered
wisely and deeply these successive epistles of his. He knew him too well
for that. But for him duty was always duty. "Here a little, and there a
little." It would have pained the old gentleman grievously to know the
full extent of the wickedness of his boy,--to have looked for a moment
into the haunts to which he was beguiled by his companions of the
city,--to have seen his flushed and swollen face after some of those
revels to which Reuben was a party. But the good Doctor was too ignorant
of the world to conceive, even, of larger latitude than an occasional
cigar or a stolen sight at the orgies of the theatre. And when Mr.
Brindlock wrote, as he took occasion to do about this period, regretting
the extravagance of Reuben and the bad associations into which he had
fallen, and urging the Doctor to impress upon him the advantages of
regularity and of promptitude, and to warn him that a very advantageous
business career which was opening upon him would be blighted by his
present habits, the poor gentleman was fairly taken aback.

That even this worldly gentleman, Mr. Brindlock, should take exception
to the courses of his son was a most startling fact. What admonition
could the Doctor add to those which he had addressed to his poor son
fortnightly for years past? Had he not warned him over and over that he
was standing upon slippery places? Had he not unfolded the terrors of
God's wrath upon sinners? Had he not set before him in "line upon line"
the awful truth that his immortal career was at stake? And should he
descend from this ground to plead with him upon the score of his
short-lived worldly career? What were all business prospects, however
they might wane, compared with that dreadful prospect which lies before
him who refuseth godly counsel and hardeneth his heart? Was it not a
fearful confirmation of Satan's reign upon earth, that peril to a
temporal career should serve for warning against criminal excesses, when
the soul's everlasting peril was urged vainly? The Doctor