Walter felt was meant in part for him. It was on the danger and
unwisdom of brooding continually on what is over; and it was preached
upon the text, "I will restore to you the years which the locust hath
eaten, the canker-worm, the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great
army."

"The past is past," said the preacher; "its sins and sorrows are
irrevocably over; why dwell upon it now? Do not waste the present, with
all its opportunities, in a hopeless and helpless retrospect. The worst
of us need not despair, much less those who may have been betrayed into
sudden error by some moment of unguarded passion. There lies the future
before you; onwards then, and forwards! it is yet an innocent, it may be
a happy, future. Take it with prayerful thankfulness, and fling the
withered part aside. Thus, although thus only, can you recover your
neglected opportunities. Do this in hope and meekness, and God will
make up to you for the lost past; He Who inhabiteth eternity will
stretch forth out of His eternity a forgiving hand, and touch into green
leaf again the years which the locust hath eaten." How eagerly Walter
Evson drank in those words! That day at least he felt that man doth not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God.

If Walter had been old enough to be an observer of character, he might
have gathered out of his difficulties the materials for some curious
observation on the manner in which he was treated by different boys.
Many, like Harpour and Cradock, made, of course, no sort of difference
in their behaviour towards him, because they set up no pretence of
condemnation; others, like Anthony and Franklin, had been nearly as bad
as himself in the matter, and therefore their relations to him remained
quite unaltered. But there were many boys who, like Jones, either cut
him or were cold to him, not because they really felt any moral anger at
a fault which was much less heinous in reality than many which they
daily committed, but because he was, for the time, unpopular, and they
did not care to be seen with an unpopular boy. On the other hand,
through a feeling, which at the time they could not understand, a few of
the very best boys, some of the wisest, the steadiest, the noblest,
seemed drawn to him by some new tie; and in a very short time he began
to know friends among them in whose way he might not otherwise have been
thrown. Daubeny, for instance, than whom, although