nderly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech.
'Come now, Lord Jesus,' I cried, 'come now and take me to be for
ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is
purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this
wicked world. Oh, come now, now, and take me before I have known
the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all
the dreadful things that happen there!' And I raised myself on
the sofa, and leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the
glorious apparition.

This was the highest moment of my religious life, the apex of my
striving after holiness. I waited awhile, watching; and then I
felt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted,
although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I hoped. Then a
little breeze sprang up and the branches danced. Sounds began to
rise from the road beneath me. Presently the colour deepened, the
evening came on. From far below there rose to me the chatter of
the boys returning home. The tea-bell rang,--last word of prose
to shatter my mystical poetry. 'The Lord has not come, the Lord
will never come,' I muttered, and in my heart the artificial
edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble. From
that moment forth my Father and I, though the fact was long
successfully concealed from him and even from myself, walked in
opposite hemispheres of the soul, with 'the thick o' the world
between us'.

EPILOGUE

THIS narrative, however, must not be allowed to close with the
Son in the foreground of the piece. If it has a value, that value
consists in what light it may contrive to throw upon the unique
and noble figure of the Father. With the advance of years, the
characteristics of this figure became more severely outlined,
more rigorously confined within settled limits. In relation to
the Son--who presently departed, at a very immature age, for the
new life in London--the attitude of the Father continued to be
one of extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into
disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no jot or tittle of
his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn
tight; the Biblical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking
into position the head of the dejected neophyte. That young soul,
removed from the Father's personal inspection, began to blossom
forth crudely and irregularly enough, into new provinces of
thought, through fresh layers of experience. To the painful
mentor at home i