industry but unusual aptitude for business It was with special pleasure that I learned that he was turning his thoughts to the subject of religion.  During the services in the little Pine-street church he would sit with thoughtful face, and not seldom with moistened eyes.  He read the Bible and prayed in secret.  I was not surprised when he came to me one day and opened his heart.  The great crisis in his life had come.  God was speaking to his soul, and he was listening to his voice.  The uplifted cross drew him, and he yielded to the gentle attraction.  We prayed together, and henceforth there was a new and sacred bond that bound us to each other.  I felt that I was a witness to the most solemn transaction that can take place on earth—­the wedding of a soul to a heavenly faith.  Soon thereafter he went to Virginia, to attend college.  There he united with the Church.  His letters to me were full of gratitude and joy.  It was the blossoming of his spiritual life, and the air was full of its fragrance, and the earth was flooded with glory.  A pedestrian tour among the Virginia hills brought him into communion with Nature at a time when it was rapture to drink in its beauty and its grandeur.  The light kindled within his soul by the touch of the Holy Spirit transfigured the scenery upon which he gazed, and the glory of God shone round about the young student in the flush and blessedness of his first love.  O blessed days!  O days of brightness, and sweetness, and rapture!  The soul is then in its blossoming-time, and all high enthusiasms, all bright dreams, all thrilling joys, are realities which inwork themselves into the consciousness, to be forgotten never; to remain with us as prophecies of the eternal springtime that awaits the true-hearted on the hills of God beyond the grave, or as accusing voices charging us with the murder of our dead ideals!  Amid the dust and din of the battle in after-years we turn to this radiant spot in our journey with smiles or tears; according as we have been true or false to the impulses, aspirations, and purposes inspired within us by that first, and brightest, and nearest manifestation of God.  Such a season is a natural to every life as the April buds and June roses are to forest and garden.  The springtime of some lives is deferred by unpropitious circumstance to the time when it should be glowing with autumnal glory, and rich in the fruitage of the closing year.  The life that does not blossom into religion in youth may have light at noon, and peace at sunset, but misses the morning glory on the hills, and the dew that sparkles on grass and flower.  The call of God to the young to seek him early is the expression of a true psychology no less than of a love infinite in its depth and tenderness.