speaks of mourning and death, a muffled peal. News had reached the
ringers that the Archbishop of York, who had been known and respected in
the city for more than twenty-eight years, had gone home to God.

And as we ate our Christmas dinner that day, as we gathered round the
table to eat the fat and drink the sweet, the solemn voice of Old Peter,
the great minster bell, was heard tolling for the departed soul.

Truly in the midst of life we are in death, in the midst of joy there
comes sorrow, in the midst of festivity we are plunged into mourning.

'Shadow and shine is life, little Annie,
Flower and thorn.'

So the poet makes the old grandmother sum up her life's story.

And it is just the same in our religious life. One day the joy of the
Lord makes us strong, the next the sense of sin weighs us to the ground;
one moment we are ready to overflow with thanksgiving, the next we are
down in the dust mourning and weeping.

Just such a change as this, a change from the gay to the solemn, from
joy to mourning, from feasting to fasting, comes before us in the Book
of Nehemiah.

Look at Jerusalem, as we visit it in imagination to-day, and take a
bird's-eye view of the city. The whole place is mad with joy. They are
keeping the gayest, the merriest, the prettiest feast in the whole year,
the Feast of Tabernacles. It was a saying amongst the Jews, that unless
a man had been present at the Feast of Tabernacles he did not know what
joy was. And in Nehemiah's time this feast was kept more fully and with
more rejoicing than it had been kept for a thousand years; no one had
ever witnessed such a Feast of Tabernacles since the days of Joshua.

The city was a mass of green booths, made with branches of olive, pine,
myrtle, and palm; and in these the people lived, and ate, and slept for
eight days; whilst the whole city was lighted up, and glad music was
constantly heard, and the people feasted, and laughed, and made merry.

It was the 22nd day of the month Tisri when the Feast of Tabernacles was
ended, and only two days afterwards there came a remarkable change.

Look at Jerusalem again, you would hardly know it to be the same place.
The green booths are all gone, they have been carefully cleared away.
There is not a branch, or a banner, or a bit of decoration to be seen.
The bright holiday dresses, the gay blue, and red, and yellow, and
lilac robes, the smart, many-coloured turbans have all been laid by;
there is n