es, madam," said I, "this is a very grievous and terrible
visitation. I hope we may learn the lessons which it is calculated to
teach us." "I am sure," answered she, "I am not likely to forget it for
a while, for it has been a grievous loss to me." "I told her I was
very glad." "Glad!" she rejoined. "Yes," I said, "I am glad to find
that you think it so great a loss, for that loss may then be a gain
indeed. There is, thanks be to God, enough left in our memories to
carry us to heaven." "Ah! but," said she, "the hundred pounds and
the villany of my maid-servant. Have you not heard?" This gave me some
glimpse as to the secret of her sorrow. She told me that she had
deposited several bank-notes in the leaves of her family Bible,
thinking that, to be sure, nobody was likely to look there for them.
"No sooner," said she, "were the Bibles made useless by this strange
event, than my servant peeped into every copy in the house, and she
now denies that she found any thing in my old family Bible, except two
or three blank leaves of thin paper, which, she says, she destroyed;
that, if any characters were ever on them, they must have been erased
when those of the Bible were obliterated. But I am sure she lies; for
who would believe that Heaven took the trouble to blot out my precious
bank-notes. They were not God's word, I trow." It was clear that she
considered the "promise to pay" better by far than any "promises" which
the book contained. "I should not have cared so much about the Bible,"
she whined, hypocritically, "because, as you truly observe, our
memories may retain enough to carry us to heaven,"--a little in that
case would certainly go a great way, I thought to myself,--"and if not,
there are those who can supply the loss. But who is to get my bank-notes
back again? Other people have only lost their Bibles." It was, indeed,
a case beyond my power of consolation.

The calamity not only strongly stirred the feelings of men, and upon
the whole, I think, beneficially, but it immediately stimulated their
ingenuity. It was wonderful to see the energy with which men discussed
the subject, and the zeal, too, with which they ultimately exerted
themselves to repair the loss. I could even hardly regret it, when I
considered what a spectacle of intense activity, intellectual and moral,
the visitation had occasioned. It was very early suggested, that the
whole Bible had again and again been quoted piecemeal in one book or
other; that