me with their fixed idea, how God could care for
anything else. They actually believe that the very Son of the
life-making God lived and died for that, and for nothing else. That
such men and women are fools, is and has been so widely believed, that,
to men of the stamp of my indignant reader, it has become a fact! But
the end alone will reveal the beginning. Such a fool was Prometheus,
with the vulture at his heart--but greater than Jupiter with his gods
around him.

There soon came a change, however, and the lessons ceased altogether.

Tom had come down to his old quarters, and, in the arrogance of
convalescence, had presumed on his imagined strength, and so caught
cold. An alarming relapse was the consequence, and there was no more
playing; for now his condition began to draw to a change, of which, for
some time, none of them had even thought, the patient had seemed so
certainly recovering. The cold settled on his lungs, and he sank
rapidly.

Joseph, whose violin was useless now, was not the less in attendance.
Every evening, when his work was over, he came knocking gently at the
door of the parlor, and never left until Tom was settled for the night.
The most silently helpful, undemonstrative being he was, that doctor
could desire to wait upon patient. When it was his turn to watch, he
never closed an eye, but at daybreak--for it was now spring--would
rouse Mary, and go off straight to his work, nor taste food until the
hour for the mid-day meal arrived.

Tom speedily became aware that his days were numbered--phrase of
unbelief, for are they not numbered from the beginning? Are our hairs
numbered, and our days forgotten--till death gives a hint to the
doctor? He was sorry for his past life, and thoroughly ashamed of much
of it, saying in all honesty he would rather die than fall for one
solitary week into the old ways--not that he wished to die, for, with
the confidence of youth, he did not believe he could fall into the old
ways again. For my part, I think he was taken away to have a little
more of that care and nursing which neither his mother nor his wife had
been woman enough to give the great baby. After all, he had not been
one of the worst of babies.

Is it strange that one so used to bad company and bad ways should have
so altered, in so short a time, and without any great struggle? The
assurance of death at the door, and a wholesome shame of things that
are past, may, I think, lead up to such a swift c