For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought daily to their notice.  In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily, informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine wrath impressed upon them “when the memory is wax to receive and marble to retain.”

Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child, and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder.  But Clytie, who had said “I’ll make my own of them,” was tireless and not without ingenuity in opening the way of life to their little feet.

Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught many instructive bits chosen from the scrap-book in which her literary treasures were preserved.  His rendition of a passage from one of Mr. Spurgeon’s sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he listened.

“There is a place,” the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, “where the only music is the symphony of damned souls.  Where howling, groaning, moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert.  There is a place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire, torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water—­that water all denied.  When thou diest, O Sinner—­”

But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have to go to the kitchen for a drink of water.  Always he became thirsty here.  And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire his brother in the closing periods.

—­“but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood, thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell’s unutterable torment.”

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled God with a little g.