a sad death--not in his
bed, a circumstance the most painful to the mind of the peasant--and
now the funeral psalm was to be sung in memory of his sudden departure.
Moreover, Bartle Massey was not at church, and Joshua's importance in
the choir suffered no eclipse. It was a solemn minor strain they sang.
The old psalm-tunes have many a wail among them, and the words--

Thou sweep'st us off as with a flood;
We vanish hence like dreams--

seemed to have a closer application than usual in the death of poor
Thias. The mother and sons listened, each with peculiar feelings.
Lisbeth had a vague belief that the psalm was doing her husband good; it
was part of that decent burial which she would have thought it a greater
wrong to withhold from him than to have caused him many unhappy days
while he was living. The more there was said about her husband, the
more there was done for him, surely the safer he would be. It was poor
Lisbeth's blind way of feeling that human love and pity are a ground of
faith in some other love. Seth, who was easily touched, shed tears, and
tried to recall, as he had done continually since his father's death,
all that he had heard of the possibility that a single moment of
consciousness at the last might be a moment of pardon and reconcilement;
for was it not written in the very psalm they were singing that the
Divine dealings were not measured and circumscribed by time? Adam had
never been unable to join in a psalm before. He had known plenty of
trouble and vexation since he had been a lad, but this was the first
sorrow that had hemmed in his voice, and strangely enough it was sorrow
because the chief source of his past trouble and vexation was for ever
gone out of his reach. He had not been able to press his father's
hand before their parting, and say, "Father, you know it was all right
between us; I never forgot what I owed you when I was a lad; you forgive
me if I have been too hot and hasty now and then!" Adam thought but
little to-day of the hard work and the earnings he had spent on his
father: his thoughts ran constantly on what the old man's feelings had
been in moments of humiliation, when he had held down his head before
the rebukes of his son. When our indignation is borne in submissive
silence, we are apt to feel twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own
generosity, if not justice; how much more when the object of our anger
has gone into everlasting silence, and we have seen his