other end of the saw for twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath meant, and that, though their assigned cause lay in the block before them or the weather, the real cause was indoors.  His trouble was made worse, because he could not understand why he received no relief, although he had so often laid himself open before the Lord, and wrestled for help in prayer.  In his younger days he had been subject to great temptation.  One night he had nearly fallen, but an Invisible Power seized him.  “It was no more I,” he said, “than if somebody had come and laid hold of me by the scruff of my neck,” and he was forced away in terror upstairs to his bedroom, where he went on his knees in agony, and the Devil left him, and he became calm and pure.  But no such efficient help was given him in the trial of his life.  He knew in his better moments, that the refusal of grace was the Lord’s own doing, and he supposed that it was due to His love and desire to try him; but upon this assurance he could not continually rest.  It slipped away from under him, and at times he felt himself to be no stronger than the merest man of the world.

His case was very simple and very common—­the simplest, commonest case in life.  He married, as we have said, when he was young, before he knew what he was doing, and after he had been married twelvemonths, he found he did not care for his wife.  When they became engaged, he was in the pride of youth, but curbed by his religion.  He mistook passion for love; reason was dumb, and had nothing to do with his choice; he made the one, irretrievable false step and was ruined.  No strong antipathy developed itself; there were no quarrels, but there was a complete absence of anything like confidence.  Michael had never for years really consulted his wife in any difficulty, because he knew he could not get any advice worth a moment’s consideration; and he often contrasted his lot with that of David, who had a helpmate like that of the left arm to the right, who knew everything about his affairs, advised him in every perplexity, and cheered him when cast down—­a woman on whom he really depended.  As David knew well enough, although he never put it in the form of a proposition, there is no joy sweeter than that begotten by the dependence of the man upon the woman for something she can supply but he cannot—­not affection only, but assistance.

Michael, as we have said, had two children, a girl and a boy, the boy being the eldest.  Against neither could he ever utter a word of complaint.  They were honest and faithful.  But the girl, Eliza, although unlike her mother, was still less like her father, and had a plain mind, that is to say, a mind endowed with good average common sense, but unrelieved by any touch of genius or poetry.  Her intellect was solid but ordinary—­a kind of homely brown intellect, untouched by sunset or sunrise tint.  A strain of the mother was in her, modified by the influence of the father, and