ts were young in years and unacquainted with
sorrow, and very dear to their loving hearts was the sick infant. They
felt they could not part with the dear one. Carefully they nursed the
flickering lamp of life: through that dreary winter night, lest some
ruder blast should extinguish it forever. Wished they to join the
thoughtless throng in the tinselled hall of fashion? O, no, they had
rather count the fluttering pulses of their dear boy, cool his fevered
brow, and administer the reviving cordial through the weary hours of
the night, than to listen to sweetest strains of Orpheus' harp, or
thread the winding mazes of the giddy dance.

And so with them the night wore away, the long dark night of suffering
to the babe, and watchful anxiety to the parents. But the angel of
death that had hovered so long over the darling babe, unfurled his
sable pinions and flew away in search of another victim, and he is
spared yet a little longer.

Pursuing the way a little farther in another direction, you find
another weary watcher by the midnight lamp. An aged woman, who has
lived her three score years and ten, sits bolstered up in her chair,
toiling for her little remaining sum of existence, which nature seems
unwilling to relinquish, although subsisting now upon borrowed time.
From an adjoining room comes a frequent hollow cough, and the sunken
eye and emaciated frame of the poor girl betray the secret foe,
lurking in the hidden springs of life.

Death is no stranger beneath this roof. He has borne away one after
another from this numerous household, and laid them down side by side
in the silent grave. And now his darts seem aimed at the two only ones
of that household, the mother and her daughter. The sons are married
and have families of their own, but the mother and this daughter live
alone in the home of her youth, the very place, perchance, where she
was brought a gay and expecting bride by that husband she is expecting
now to follow so soon to the spirit world. Could the pleasures or the
gaities of the world cast one cheering beam upon their lonely home? O,
no, the religion of Jesus alone can illuminate their benighted hearts,
and in "this light they see light," and feel prepared to go when the
summons comes.

Following the street, you pass the door of a daughter who is weeping
for the recent loss of a mother, who passes suddenly away without
a moment's warning, and a widow who mourns a husband, cut off by
lingering diseas