with
a book in his hand,--James Marvyn,--as truly and heartily a creature of
this material world as Mary was of the invisible and heavenly.

There are some who seem made to _live;_--life is such a joy to them,
their senses are so fully _en rapport_ with all outward things, the
world is so keenly appreciable, so much a part of themselves, they are
so conscious of power and victory in the government and control of
material things, that the moral and invisible life often seems to hang
tremulous and unreal in their minds, like the pale, faded moon in the
light of a gorgeous sunrise. When brought face to face with the great
truths of the invisible world, they stand related to the higher wisdom
much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades to the divine Socrates, or like
the young man in Holy Writ to Him for whose appearing Socrates longed;--
they gaze, imperfectly comprehending, and at the call of ambition or
riches turn away sorrowing.

So it was with James;--in full tide of worldly energy and ambition,
there had been forming over his mind that hard crust, that skepticism
of the spiritual and exalted, which men of the world delight to call
practical sense; he had been suddenly arrested and humbled by the
revelation of a nature so much nobler than his own that he seemed
worthless in his own eyes. He had asked for love; but when _such_ love
unveiled itself, he felt like the disciple of old in the view of a
diviner tenderness,--"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man."

But it is not often that all the current of a life is reversed in one
hour; and now, as James stood on the ship's deck, with life passing
around him, and everything drawing upon the strings of old habits, Mary
and her religion recurred to his mind as some fair, sweet, inexplicable
vision. Where she stood he saw; but how _he_ was ever to get there
seemed as incomprehensible as how a mortal man should pillow his form on
sunset clouds.

He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed
by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his
thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied. Yet there
were within him yearnings and cravings, wants never felt before, the
beginning of that trouble which must ever precede the soul's rise to a
higher plane of being.

There we leave him. We have shown you now our three different
characters, each one in its separate sphere, feeling the force of that
strongest and holiest power wi