. You must
not call the father an old pedant, for the fact is, it was the son who
was the pedant if there was one in that happy house. The two intimate
friends had a word between them they called _agenda_. And nobody but
themselves knew where they had borrowed that uncouth word, what language
it was, or what it meant. Only in the old man's tattered pocket-book
there were things like this found by his minister after his death.
Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass
case, and in old Mr. Meditation's ramshackle hand: 'Monday, death;
Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past
life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Saviour; Lord's day,
creation, salvation, and my own.--M.' And then, on an utterly illegible
page, this: 'Jesus, Thy life and Thy words are a perpetual sermon to me.
I meditate on Thee all the day. Make my memory a vessel of election. Let
all my thoughts be plain, honest, pious, simple, prudent, and charitable,
till Thou art pleased to draw the curtain and let me see Thyself, O
Eternal Jesu!' If I had time I could tell you more about Think-well's
quaint old father. But the above may be better than nothing about the
rare old gentleman.

A great authority has said--two great authorities have said in their
enigmatic way, that a 'dry light is ever the best.' That may be so in
some cases and to some uses, but nothing can be more sure than this, that
the light that little Think-well got from his father's head was
excellently drenched in his mother's heart. The sweet moisture of his
mother's heart mixed up beautifully with his father's drier head and made
a fine combination in their one boy as it turned out. Her minister,
preaching on one occasion on my text for to-night, had said--and she had
such a memory for a sermon that she had never forgotten it, but had laid
it up in her heart on the spot--'As the philosopher's stone,' the old-
fashioned preacher had said, 'turns all metals into gold, as the bee
sucks honey out of every flower, and as the good stomach sucks out some
sweet and wholesome nourishment out of whatever it takes into itself, so
doth a holy heart, so far as sanctified, convert and digest all things
into spiritual and useful thoughts. This you may see in Psalm cvii. 43.'
And in her plain, silent, hidden, motherly way Mistress Piety adorned her
old minister's doctrine of the holy heart that he was always preaching
about,