his observation—­he only heard what was pure in precept—­he only witnessed what was worthy in practice.  But when the boy began to be lost in youth, the attentive father saw cause for alarm.  Shades of sadness, which gradually assumed a darker character, began to overcloud the young man’s temper.  Tears, which seemed involuntary, broken sleep, moonlight wanderings, and a melancholy for which he could assign no reason, seemed to threaten at once his bodily health and the stability of his mind.  The astrologer was consulted by letter, and returned for answer, that this fitful state of mind was but the commencement of his trial, and that the poor youth must undergo more and more desperate struggles with the evil that assailed him.  There was no hope of remedy, save that he showed steadiness of mind in the study of the Scriptures.  “He suffers,” continued the letter of the sage, “from the awakening of these harpies, the passions, which have slept with him as with others, till the period of life which he has now attained.  Better, far better, that they torment him by ungrateful cravings, than that he should have to repent having satiated them by criminal indulgence.”  The dispositions of the young man were so excellent, that he combated, by reason and religion, the fits of gloom which at times overcast his mind; and it was not till he attained the commencement of his twenty-first year, that they assumed a character which made his father tremble for the consequences.  It seemed as if the gloomiest and most hideous of mental maladies were taking the form of religious despair.  Still the youth was gentle, courteous, affectionate, and submissive to his father’s will, and resisted with all his power the dark suggestions which were breathed into his mind, as it seemed, by some emanation of the Evil Principle, exhorting him, like the wicked wife of Job, to curse God and die.

The time at length arrived when he was to perform what was then thought a long and somewhat perilous journey, to the mansion of the early friend who had calculated his nativity.  His road lay through several places of interest, and he enjoyed the amusement of travelling more than he himself thought would have been possible.  Thus he did not reach the place of his destination till noon, on the day preceding his birthday.  It seemed as if he had been carried away with an unwonted tide of pleasurable sensation, so as to forget, in some degree, what his father had communicated concerning the purpose of his journey.  He halted at length before a respectable but solitary old mansion, to which he was directed as the abode of his father’s friend.  The servants who came to take his horse, told him he had been expected for two days.  He was led into a study, where the stranger, now a venerable old man, who had been his father’s guest, met him with a shade of displeasure as well as gravity on his brow.  “Young man,” said he, “wherefore so slow on a journey of such importance?” “I thought,”