Decatur Democrat, Volume 38, Number 13, Decatur, Adams County, 15 June 1894 — Page 7

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I & wire vcßFi •**jaii > # '\J[ #// / I I • >rn < *#/ h ' . S o i’. . LXXXX>W?.< CHAPTER X—Continued. “The river,” thought Constance, white with horror: “the ruins are only a little way from the river. ” She ran along the romantic pathway which followed the river bank for about half a mile, and there ascended the steep hill on the slope of which stood the battered old shell which had once been a feudal castle, with duneons beneath its stately halls, and a eep and sacred well for the safe puting away of troublesome enemies. Very peaceful looked the old ruins on his balmy September day, in the melow afternoon sunshine, solitary, silent, leserted. There was no trace of nurse >r child in the grassy court or on the irumbling old rampart Yes, just where he ramport looked down upon the Ivor, just at that point where the hort, submerged grass sloped deepst, Constance Sinclair found a token f her child’s presence—-a toy dog, rhite, fleecy, and deliciously untrue to Mture—an animal whose shapeless •auty had been the baby Christabel’s elight Constance gave a little cry of joy. “They have been here, they are imewhere near,” she thought, and ion, suddenly, in the sweet summer lillness the peril of this particular x>t struck her—that steep descent—xe sunburned sward, slippery as lass— the deep, swift current below—le utter loneliness of the scene—no sip at hand. "Oh, Godi” she cried, “the river, the ver!” She looked round her with wild, beeching eyes, as if she would have iked all nature to help her in this freat agony. There was no one within right The nearest house was a cot||ge on the bank of the river, about M hundred yards from the bottom of Be slope. A narrow foot-path at the ■her end of the rampart led to the Bnk, and by this path Constance ■tried down to make inquiries at the ■ttage. ■The door, was standing open, and ■ere was a noise of several voices (■thin. Some one wai lying on a bed I a corner, and a group of peasant ■men were round hit ejaculating ■npafsionately. ■Das arme madchen. Ach, Himmel! <lu gibt es?" and a good deal more of [Spasmodic and sympathetic nature. M woman’s garments, dripping wet, Bro hanging in front of the stove, belle which sat an elderly vine-dresser stolid countenance smoking his fftonstance Sinclair put the women 1 Bde and made her way to the bed. yas Melanie who lay there wrapped Hl blanket, sobbing hysterically. ■Melanie, where is my child?” Whe shrieked and turned her Uy to the wall. |Ehe risked her life to save it, ” said H man in German. “The current is By rapid under the old Schloss. She iMiged in after the baby. I found U in the water, clinging to the liWich of a willow. If I had been a |Ae later she would have been ■lwned.” f Blind the child— my child?” 3 |ll\.ch, mein Gott!” exclaimed the KA, with a shrug. “No one has seen RBpcor child. No one knows.” I Bly child is drowned!” Ifljfebe Frau,"said one of the women, [ B current is strong. The little one UH at play cn the rampart. Its foot I Hed, and it rolled down the hill IB the water. This good girl ran LBn after it, and jumped into the Hr. My husband found her there. Igßtried io save the child; she could igHomore. But the current was too Dear lady, be comforted. The KB God will help you. ” fBo. Gcd is cruel," cried Constance. B Hill never sse Him or believe in KB any more. ” HBid with this blasphpmy,wrung from ■B tortured heart, a great wave of ■■l seemed to rush oyer Constance KHa'r s brain, and she fell senseless BBie stone floor. ■| CHAPTER XI. ■ I GUTTING OVXH IT. ||Bby Christabel was drowned. Os Kfl fact there could not be a shadow BBubt in the minds of those who had B her, although the sullen stream BBh had swallowed her lovely form Bed to give it back. Perhaps the ■Bis had taken her for their play|fHv, and transformed her mortal Bty into something rich and strange. wHvhow, the nets that dragged the MB did not bring up the golden hair, HHhe sad drowned eyes that once BOBd with joyous life. • And if any■kß could add to Constance Sinclair s BBit was this last drop of bitterknowledge that her child i® Hi never rest in hallowed ground, Hhere was no quiet grave on which MW her aching bead and feel nearer |HBarling, no spot of earth to which Build press her lips and fancy she MiMbe heard by the little one lying |B ■* pure shroud below, asleep on Sftßr Earth’s calm breast. ■ her little one was driven by gg and waves, and had no resting■HHunder the weary stars. sfWijanie Duport, when she recovered BMhe horror of that one dreadful ft Bold her st ry clearly enough. It Ho same story she had told the Hit woman whose husband rescued BfaßFabv Christabel was playing on B m part, Melanie holding her se- / H, as she believed, when the little aßKtracted by the flight of a butter- < Kde a sudden spring—alas! mall

dame knew not how strong and active the dear agel was, and how difficult it was to hold her somet mes—and slipped out of Melanie's arms on to the rampart—which was very low just there, a« madame m'ght have observed —on to the grass, and rolled and rolled down to the river. ’ It was all as quick as thought; one moment and the angel’s white frock was floating on the stream. Melanie tore down, she knew not how; It was as if heaven had given her wings in that moment The white frock was still floating. Melanie plunged into the river; ah! but what was her life at such a time?—a nothing. Alas! she tried to grasp the frock, but the stream swept it from her: an Instant and one saw it no more. She felt herself sinking, and then sho fainted. She knew nothing until she woke in the cottage where madame found her. Melanie was a heroine in a small way after this sad event. The villagers thought her a wonderful person. Her master rewarded her handsomely, and promised to retain her in his service till she should choose to marry. Her 1 mistress was as grateful as despair can ■ be for any service. The light of Constance Sinclair's life was gbne. Her one source of joy was turned to a fountain of bitterness. A dull and b ank despair took possession of her. She did not succumb utterly to her grief. She struggled against it bravely, and she°’would accept no one’s compassion cr sympathy. One of her married sisters, a comfortable matron with half a dozen healthy children in her nursery, offered to come and stay with Mrs. Sinclair; but this kindly offer was refused almost uncivilly. “What good could you do me?”asked Constance. “If you spoke tameof my darling I should hate you, yet I should always be thinking of her. Do you suppose you ccu’.d comfort me by telling me about your herd of children, or by repeating bits of Scripture, such as people quote in letters of condolence? No; there is no such thing as comfort for my grief. I like to sit al ne and think of my pet, and be wretched in my own way. Don’t be angry with me, dear, for writing so savagely. I sometimes feel as if I hated everyone in the world, but happy mothers most of all.” Gilbert Sinclair endured the loss of his little girl with a certain amount of philosophy. In the first place she was not a boy, and had offended him ab initio by that demerit. She had boen a pretty little darling, no doubt, and he had had his moments of fondness for her; but his wife’s idolatry of the child was an offense that had rankled dvep. He had been jealous of his infant daughter. He put on mourning and expressed himself deeply afflicted, but his burden did not press heavily. A boy would come, perhaps, by and by, and make amends for this present loss, and Constance would begin her baby worship again. Mr. Sinclair did not know that for some hearts there is no beginning again. Martha Briggs recovered health and strength, but her grief for the lost baby was genuine and unmistakable. Constance offered to keep her in her service, but this favor Martha dec ined with tears. “No, ma’im, its best for both that we shou’d part. I should remind you of”—here a burst of sobs supplied the missing name—“and you’d remind me. I’ll go home. I’m more grateful than words can say for all your gcodness; but, oh, I hate myself so for being ill. I never, never, shall forgive myself—never.” So Martha went back to Davenant in her mistress’ train, and there parted with hei to return to the parental roof, which was not very far off. It was not so with Melanie. She only clung to her mistress more devotedly after the loss of the baby. If her dear lady would but let her remain with her as her cwn maid, she would be beyond measure happy. Was not hairdressing the art in which she most delighted, and millinery the natural bent of her mind? Gilbert said the girl had acted nobly, and ought to be retained in his wifes service; so Constance, whose Abigail had lately left her to better herself by marriage with an aspiring butler, consented to keep Melanie as her personal attendant. She did this, believing with Gilbert that the girl deserved recompense; but Melanie’s presence was full of painful associations, and kept the bitter memory of her lost child continually before her. Constance went back to Davenant, and life flowed on in its sullen course somehow without Baby Christabel. The two rooms that had been nurseries —two of the prettiest ropms in the big old house, with French windows and a wide balcony, with a flight of steps leading down to the quaintest old garden, shut in from the rest of the grounds by a holly hedge—now became temples dedicated to the Lost. But the business of life still went on, and there was a great deal of time she could not call, her own. Gilbert, having dismissed the memory of his lost child to the limbo of unpleasant recollections, resented his wife's brooding grief as a personal injury, and was determined to give that sullen sorrow no indulgence. When the hunting season was at its best.and pheasant shooting made one of the attractions of Davenant, Mr. Sincl&lr determined to fill his house with his own particular set — horsy men—men who gave their minds to guns and dogs, and rarely opened their mouths for speech except to relate an anecdote about an accomplished setter, or “1 ver-colored pointer of mine, you know,” or to dilate upon the noble behavior of “that central fire Lancaster of mine,” in yesterday's battue—men who devoted their nights an I days to billiards, and whose conversation was of breaks and flukes, pockets and cannons. “You'd better ask some women, Constance, ” said Gilbert, one Sunday morning in November, as they sat at their tete-a-tete breakfast, the wife reading her budget of lettsrs, the husband with the “F.eld” propped up in front of h's coffee-cup, am the “Sporting Gazette” at h s elbow. “I ve got a lot of men coming next week, and you might feel yourself de trop in a masculinepa ty/ "Have you a ked people, Hilbert, so soon?” laid Constance, reproachfully. “I don’t know what you call soonThe pheasants are as wild as way aaa

be, and Lord Hlghover's hounds have been out nearly a month. You’d better ask some nice young women—the right sort, you know; no nonsense about them.” "I thought we should havto Spent this winter quietly, Gilbert,” said Constance, in a low voice, looking down at her black dress with its deep folds of crape; “just this one winter/ “That’s sheer sentimentality,” exclaimed Gilbert, giving the “Field” an impatient twist as he folded it to get at his favorite column. “What good would it do you or me to shut ourselves up in this dismal old house like a pair of superannuated owls? Would it bring back the poor little thing we’ve lost, or make her happier in Paradise? No. Constance. She’s happy. 'Nothing can touch her more,’ as Milton, or somebody, says. Egad, I think the poor little darling is to be envied for having escaped all the troubles and worries of life; for life at best is a bad book; you can’t hedge everything. Don’t cry, Constance. That long face of yours is enough to send a fellow into an untimely grave. Let us get a lot of pleasant people round us, and make the most of this place while it’s ours. We mayn’t have it always.” The sinister remark fell upon an unheeded ear. Constance Sinclair’s thoughts had wandered far away from that oak-paneled breakfast-room. They had gone back to the sunny hillside, the grassy rampart, the swift and fatal river, the bright landscape which had stamped itself upon her memory indelibly, in the one agonized moment in which she had divined her darling’s fate. “Gilbert, I really am not fit to receive people,” she said, after a silence of some minutes, during which Mr. Sinclair had amused himself by sundry ad venturous dips of his fork, like an old Jewish priest’s dive into the sacred seething-pot, into the crockery case of a Perigord pie. “If you have sat your heart upon having your friends this winter you had better let me go away, to Hastings or somewhere. It would be a pleasure for you to be free from the sight of my unhappiness." “Yes. and for you to find consolati n elsewhere, no doubt You would pretty soon find a consoler if I gave you your liberty." “Gilbert!” “Oh. don’t think to frighten me with your indignant looks. 1 have not forgotten the scene in this room when you heard your old lover’s supposed death. Sir Cyprian Davenant is in London, in high feather, too, I understand; for some ancient relation of his has been obliging enough to die and leave him another fortune. A pity you did not wait a little longer, isn’t it? A pity your father should have been in such a hurry to make his last matrimonial bargain.” “Gilbert!” cried Constance, passionately, “what have I ever done that you should dare to talk to me like this? How have I ever failed in my duty to you?” “Shall I tell you? I won’t say that, having accepted me for your husband, you ought to have loved me. That would be asking too much. The ethies jof the nineteenth century don’t soar so high as that But you might have pretended to care for me just a little. It would have been only civil, and. it would have made the wheels of life go smoother for both of vs.” “I am not capable of pretending, Gilbert,” answered Constance, gravely. “If you would only be a little more considerate, and give me credit for being what I am, your true and dutiful wife. I might give you as much affection as the most exacting husband could desire. I would. Gilbert,” she cried, in a voice choked with sobs, “for the sake of our dead child.” “Don’t humbug,” said Gilbert, sulkily. “We ought to understand each other by this time. As for running away from this house, or any other house of mine, to mope in solitude, or to find consolation among old friends, please comprehend that if you leave my house once you leave it forever. I shall expect to see you at the head of my table. I shall expect you to surround yourself with pretty women. I shall expect you to oe a wife that a fellow may be proud of. ” “I shall do my best to oblige you, Gilbert: but perhaps I might have been a better wife if you had let mo take life my own way. ” |TO BB CONTINUED.) A MODERN HEROINE. How She Stopped a Driver’s Brutal Treatment of a Horae. Sleighs drawn by four horses are employed on the Wellington street route, says the Montreal Star. A heavily loaded sleigh was coming cityward. One of the horses next the vehicle fell. The driver lashed it ' with his whip. Then he kicked it. Finally he swore at it. But he did not get down to extricate the animal from the harness, which held it a prisoner. The men in the sleigh bur.’ej their chins in their overcoats and indulged the contemplation of fatalism as a philosophy which removes every passion from the breast. Suddenly a lady clad in a sealskin sacque got out, and, going up to the driver, said to him in an imperative way: “Give me that whip.” The driver was dazed. In a stupefied way he handed over the whip. “Now, ” said the little lady, “if you touch, that horse again I will let you feel the weight of this whip across your shoulders. Get down this moment and cut the harness and help the horse to rise.” The driver stared at her. The women in the sleigh tittered, the men hung -their heads. “Get down this moment," said the lady, shaking the whip over the driver. The latter mechanically obeyed. The harness was loosened, the horse was raised to its feet. The lady put her hand in her sachel, brought forth some biscuits, and treated the four horses ti one each. The effect was magiciy. The hopeless cynicism of their poor faces gave place to hope, and love, and gratitude. Then the lady, very white, but as resolute as Joan of Arc eve? was, entered the sleigh. The men still, hung their heads in silence. Sir Frederick Leighton, the great English painter, is a stalwart, longnosed man of pompous manner, with curly hair and a flowing gray beard, and always wears a voluminous silk tie,< loosely knotted, the ends flowing superbly over his shoulders. He is a profoundly ornate speaker, but his periods, like his paintings, smell too strongly of the lamp, ana th«i art students, whom he addresses with immense onoe B •

TALMAGE’S SERMON. THE GREAT PREACHER SPEAKS THROUGH THE PRESS. He Take* For Hta Subject "The Excited Ooveraor" _ Why Felix Poetponed Aeceptlng the Gospel—Now to the Time to Embrace the Offer of Salvation. A Dangerous Delay. Rev. Dr. Talmage, who Is now speeding across the Pacific u> Honolulu on his round the world journey, selected as the subject for sermonic discourse through the press last Sunday “The Excited Governor,” the text being taken from Acts xxlv, 25: “Felix trembled, and answered: Go thy way for this time. v\ hen I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.” A city of marble was Caesarea—wharves of marble, houses of marble, temples of marble. This being the ordinary architecture of the place, you may imagine something of the splendor of Governor Felix’s residence. In a room of that palace, floor tessellated, windows curtained, ceiling fretted, the whole scene affluent with Tyrian purple and statues and pictures and carvings, sat a very dark complexioned man of the name of Felix, and beside him a woman of extraordinary beauty, whom he had stolen by breaking up another domestic circle. She was only 18 years of age, a princess by birth and unwittingly waiting for her doom — that of being buried alive in the ashes and scoriae of Mount Vesuvius which in sudden eruption one day put an end to her abominations. Well, one afternoon Drusilla, seated in the palace, weary with the magnificent stupidities of the place, says to Felix: “You have a very distinguished prisoner, I believe, of the name of Paul. Do you know ne is one of my countrymen? 1 should very much like to see him, and 1 should very mucti like to hear him speak, for I have heard so much about his eloquence. Besides that the other day, when he was being tried in another room of this place and the windows were open, I heard the applause that greeted the speech of Lawyer Tertullus as he denotfficed Paul. Now I very much wish 1 could hear Paul speak. Won’t you let mo hear him speak?” “Yes,” said Felix, “I wilt I will order him up now from the guardroom.” Clank, clank, comes a chain up the marble stairway, and there is a shuffle at the door, and in comes Paul, a little old man, prematurely old through ex-posure-only 60 years of age. but looking as though he were eighty. He bows very courteously before the Governor and the beautiful woman by his side. They say: “Paul, we have heard a great deal about your speaking. Give us now a specimen of your eloquence. ” Oh, if there ever was a chance of a man to show off, Paul had a chance there! He might have harangued them about Grecian art, about the wonderful waterworks he bad seen at Corinth, about the Acropolis by moon ■ light, about prison lile in Philippi, about “what I saw in Thessalonica.” about tbe old mythologies, bqt “No!” Paul said to himself. “I am now on the way to martyrdom, and this man and woman will soon be dead, and this is my only opportunity to talk to them about the things of eternity.” And just there and then there broke in upon the scene a peal of thunder. It was the voice of a judgment aay speaking through the words of the decrepit apostle. As that grand old missionary proceeded with his remarks the stoop begins to go out of his shoulders, and he rises up, and his countenance is illumined with the glories of a future life, and his shackles rattle and grind as he lifts his fettered arm, and with ft hurls upon his abashed auditors the bolts of God’s indignation. Felix grew very white about the lips. His heart beat unevenly. He put his hand to his brow, as though to stop the quickness and violence of his thoughts. He drew his roue tighter about him as under a sudden chill. His eyes glare, and his knees shake, and as he clutches the side of his chair in a very paroxysm of terror he orders the Sheriff to take Paul back to the guardroom. Felix trembled and said: “Go thy way for this time. When I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.” A young man came one night to our services, with pencil in hand, to caricature the whole scene and make mirth of those who should express any anxiety about their souls, but 1 met him at the door, his face very white, tears running down his cheek, as he said, “Do you think there is any chance for me?” B’elix trembled, and so may God grant it may be so with others. Three Reason*. I propose to give you two or three reasons wny I think Felix sent Paul back to the gardroom and adjourned this whole subject of religion. The. first reason waa he did not want to give up his sins. He looked arouna. There was Drusilla. Ho knew that when he became a Chrisian ho must send her back to Azizus, her lawful husband, and he said to himself: “I will risk the destruction of my immortal soul sooner than I will do that.” How many there are now who cannot get to be Christians because they will not abandon their sins! In vain all their prayers and all their church going. You cannot keep these darling sins and win Heaven, and now some of you will have to decide between the wine cup and unlawful amusements and lascivious gratifications on the other. Delilah sheared the locks of Samson; Salome danced Herod into the pit; Drusilla blocked up the way to Heaven for Felix. Yet when f present the subject now, I fear that some of you will say: “Not quite yet. Don’t be so precipitate in your demands. I have a few tickets yet that I have to use. I have a few engagements that I must keep. I want to stay a little jonger in the whirl of conviviality—a few more guffaws of unclean laughter, a few more steps on the road to death, and then, sir, I will listen to what you say. ‘Go thy way for this time. When 1 have a convenient season I will call tor thee? ” A Convenient Season. Andtnei* reason why Felix sent Paul back to the guardroom and adjourned this subject was he was so very busy. In ordinary times he found the affairs bf State absorbing, but those were extraordinary times. The whole lani was ripe'for insurrection. The Sicarii, a band of assassins, were already prowling around the palace, and I supMte be thought, “I can’t attend to refiflta walk i ea w m tin

State, it was business, among other things, that ruined bis soul, and I suppose there arc thousands of people who are not children of God because they have so much business.” It is business in the store -losses, gains, unfaithful employees. It is business in your law office'—subpoenas, writs you have to write out, papers you have to file, arguments you have to make. It is your medical profession. with its broken nights, and tbe exhausted anxieties of life hanging upon your treatment. It is your real estate office, your business with landlords and tenants, and the failure of men to meet their obligations with you. Aye, with some of those who are here, it is the annoyance of the kitenen, and the sitting room, and the parlor—the wearing economy ot trying to meet large expenses with a small income. Ten thousand voices of “business, business, business” drown the voice of tbe eternal Spirit, silencing the voice of the advancing judgment day, overcoming the voice of eternity, and they cannot listen. They say, “Go thy way for this time.” Some of you look upon your goods, look upon your profession, you look upon your memorandum books, and you see the demands that are made this very week upon your time, and your patience, and your money, and while I Am*entreating you about your soul and the danger of procrastination you sav: “Go thy way for this time. When I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.” O Felix, why be bothered about the affairs of this world so much more than about tbe affairs of eternity? Do you know that when death comes you will have to stop business, though it be in the most exacting period of it—between tbe payment of the money and the taking of the receipt? The moment he comes you will have to go. Death waits for no man, however high, however low. Will you put your office, will you put your shop in comparison with the affairs of an eternal world, affairs that involve thrones, palaces, dominions eternal? Will you put 200 acres of ground against immensity? Will you put forty or fifty years es your life against millions of ages? O Felix, you might better postpone everything else! For do you not know that the upholstering of Tyrian purple in your palace will fade, and the marble blocks of Caesarea will crumble, and the breakwater at the beach, made es great blocks of stone 60 feet long, must give way before the perpetual wash of the sea, but the redemption that Paul offers you will be fore ver? And yet and yet and yet you wave him back to the guardroom, saying: “Go thy way for this time. When I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.” Honor* of the World. Again Felix adjourned this subject of religion and put off Paul’s argument because he could not give up the honors of the world. • He was afraid somehow that he would be compromised himself in this matter. Remarks he made afterward showed him to be intensely ambitious. Oh. how he hugared the saver of men! I never saw the honors of this world in their hollowness and hypocrisy so much as in the life and death of that wonderful man, Charles Sumner. As he went toward the place of burial even Independence Hall in Philadelphia asked that his remains stop there on thoir way to Boston. The flags were at half-mast, dnd the minute guns on Boston common rfrfobbed after his heart ceased.to beat. Was ft always so? While he lived, how eensured of legislative resolutions, how caricatured of the - pictorials; how charged with every mbtive mean and ridiculous; how all the urns of scorn and hatred and billingsgate emptied upon his head; how, when struck down in the Senate (Chamber, there were hundreds of thousands of people who said, “Good for him; serves him right!” how he had put the ocean between him and his maligners, that he might have a little peace, and how, when he went off sick, they said he was broken hearted because he could not get to be President or Secretary of State. O commonwealth of Massachusetts, who is that man that sleeps in your public hall, covered with garlands and wrapped in the stars and stripes? Is thatthe man who, only a few months before, you denounced as the toe of republican and democratic institutions? Is that, the same man? Ye American people, ye could not,' by one week ot funeral eulogium and newspaper leaJders, which the dead Senator could neither read nor hear, atone for twenty-five'years of maltreatment and caricature. When I see a man (ike that, pursued by all the hounds of the political kennel so long as he lives and then buried under a great pile of garlands and amid the lamentations of a whole nation, I say to myself: “What an unutterably hypocritical thing is all human applause and all human favor! You took twenty-five years in trying to pull down his fame and then take twenty-five years in trying to build his monument. My friends; was there ever a better commentary on the hollowness of all earthly favor? If there are young men who read this who are postponing ! religion in order that they may have the favors of this tforld, let me persuade them of their complete folly. If you are looking forward to gubernatorial, senatorial, or presidential chair, let me show you your great mistake. Can it be that there is now any young man saying: “Let me have political office, let me have some of the high ' positions of trust and power, and then 1 I will attend to religion, but not now. ‘Go thy way tor this time. When I have a convenient season, I will call for thee!’ ” A Dangrerou* Delay. And now my subject takes a deeper tone, and it shows what a dangerous thing is this deferring of religion.. When Paul’s chains rattled down the marble stairs of Felix, that was Felix’s last chance tor Heaven. Judging from his character afterward, he was reprobate and abandoned. And so was Drusilla. | One day in’Southern Italy there a trembling of the earth, and the air got black with smoke intershot with liquid rocks, and Vesuvius rained upon ' Drusilla and uppn her sm a horriole | tempest of ashes and fire. They did not reject religion; they only put it off They did not understand that that day, that hour tfheri Paul stood before them, was the pivotal hour upon which everything was poised, and that it tipped the wrong way. Their convenient season came when Paul add bW guardsman entered the palae®-it went away when Paul and hit guardian left Hava you HVtt MM ■■ Waftijjjf (Os A OMYM*

lent season? There is snch a great fascination about it that, though you may have great respect to the truth of Christ, yet somehow there is in your soul the thought: “Not quite yet. It is not time for me to become a Christian.” I say to a boy, “Seek Christ.” He says, “No; waft until I get to be a young man. ” I sav to the young man, “Seek Christ.” He says, “Wait until I come to midlite.” I meet the same person in midlife, and I say, “Seek Christ." “He says, “Wait until I get old.” I meet the same person in old age and say to him. “Seek Christ.” He says, “Wait until lamon my dying bed.” I am called to his dying couch. His last moments have come. I bend over the couch and listen for his last words. 1 have partially to guess wnat they are by the motion of his Ups, he is so feeble, but rallying himself, he whispers, until I can hear him say, “I—am—waiting—for—a—more — convenient— season,” and he is gone! Now I* the Accepted Time. I can tell you when your convenient season will come. I can tell you the year—it will be 1894. I can tell you what kind of a dav it will be —it will be the Sabbath dav. I can tell you what hour it will oe—it will be between 8 and 10 o’clock. In other words, it is now. Do you ask me how I know this is vour convenient season? I know it because you are here, and because the Holy Spirit is here, and because the elect sons and daughters of God are praying for your redemption. Ah, I know It is your convenient season because some of you, line Felix, trembled as all your past life comes upon you with its sins and all the future life comes upon you with its terror. This night air is aglare with torches to show you up or to show you down. It is rustling with wings to lift you into light or smite you into despair, and there is a rushing to and fro and a beating against the door of your soul as with a great thunder of emphasis, telling you, “Now, now is the best time, as it may be the only time.” May God Almighty forbid that any of you, my brethren or sisters, act the part of Felix and Drusilla and put away this great subject. If you are going to be saved ever, why not begin to-night? Throw down your sins and take the Lord’s pardon. Christ has been tramping after you many a day. An Indian and a white man became Christians. The Indian, almost as soon as he heard the gospel, believed and was saved, but the white struggled on in darkness for a long while before he found light. After their peace in Christ the white man said to the Indiah, “Why was it that I was kept so long in the darkness and you immediately found peace?” The Indian replied: “I will tell you. A prince comes along, and he offers you a coat. You look at your coat, and you say, ‘My coat is good enough,’ and you refuse his offer, but the prince comes along and he offers me the coat, and I look at my old blanket and I throw that away and take his offer. You, sir,” continued the Indian, “are clinging to your own righteousness, you think you are good enough, and you keep your own righteousness, but I have nothing, nothing, and so when Jesus offers me pardon and peace I simply take it.” My reader, why not now throw awav the wornont blanket of your sin and take the robe of a Saviour’s righteousness—a robe so white, so fair, so lustrous, that no faller an earth can whiten ft? O shepherd, to-night bring home the lost sheep! O Father, tonight give a welcoming kiss to the wan prodigal! O friend of Lazarus, to-night break down the door of the sepulcher and say to all these dead souls as by irresistible fiat: “Live! L’ve!” Luck for Sale. “My one superstition,” said a woman the Other day, “is not being willing to turn back aftet I am fairly started upon any sort of trip, if it be only to the market” It was immediately found that, in the company of ten or twelve women that was about her, every one of them shared the same belief and acted upon it. “Why,” said the first speaker, “the other day I had got just around tbe corner from my own house I discovered that I had left the note ot directions upon which I depended for the expedition i was undertaking. 1 stopped and hesitated. It was preemptory that I should go back, but my stupid faith in that old superstit’on would not Let me. For a full minute I stood in the street wondering how I could manage. Then an idea came. I went on a block to the drugstore, where there was a telephone, called up my house, and told the maid who answered the call to bring the note around to the drugstore. It cost me 10 cents in money and ten minutes in time, but I didn’t surn back.” For the benefit of these and other superstitious folk, it may be stated that they cont. ibute to a thriving industry by such beliefs. A woman in Rochester, N. Y., has a cricket farm, whose product, the chirping little insects, are sold and freely bought to bring good luck. Giving State Aid to Ex-Convicts. M. Raynal, French Minister ot the ■ Interior, has sent a circular to all 1 the prefects instructing them to encourage the formation of charitable so jeties for the assistance of all persons liberated from prison after undergoing a sentence. In this circular, lu which the minister promises state aid to such societies, M. .Raynal says: ‘‘lt is the accomplishment of a duty of justice t jward the convicts and at the same tiqie a work qf social preservation. The law on the transportation of habitual criminals has wade that duty all the more imperious. If society has the right to pronounce a sentence of perpetual banishment to a penitentiary I colony against persons who. having i undergone several sentences, are considered incorrigible, it is only on condition that those Bentenqes are not the necessary consequences of a first fault.”—London Standard. It is stated that forty-four Out of every one hundred persons in thd . United States are agriculturists; fifty-six id Canada, forty-eight in France, seventeen in Gvtnaayi aud •». . .