Hand in my pocket,—­brown paper parcel.

“Where are you, Frederic?” “Yes,” said I, for the last time.  Twine off! brown paper off.  And I learned that the “Sheffield wimble” was one of those things whose name you never heard before, which people sell you in Thames Tunnel, where a hoof-cleaner, a gimlet, a screw-driver, and a corkscrew fold into one handle.

“Yes,” said I, again.  “Pop,” said the cork “Bubble, bubble, bubble,” said the whiskey.  Bottle in one hand, full tumbler in the other, I walked in.  George poured half a tumblerful down Lycidas’s throat that time.  Nor do I dare say how much he poured down afterwards.  I found that there was need of it, from what he said of the pulse, when it was all over.  I guess Mary had some, too.

This was the turning-point.  He was exceedingly weak, and we sat by him in turn through the night, giving, at short intervals, stimulants and such food as he could swallow easily; for I remember Morton was very particular not to raise his head more than we could help.  But there was no real danger after this.

As we turned away from the house on Christmas morning,—­I to preach and he to visit his patients,—­he said to me, “Did you make that whiskey?”

“No,” said I, “but poor Dod Dalton had to furnish the corkscrew.”

And I went down to the chapel to preach.  The sermon had been lying ready at home on my desk,—­and Polly had brought it round to me,—­for there had been no time for me to go from Lycidas’s home to D Street and to return.  There was the text, all as it was the day before:—­

“They helped every one his neighbor, and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage.  So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil.”

And there were the pat illustrations, as I had finished them yesterday; of the comfort Mary Magdalen gave Joanna, the court lady; and the comfort the court lady gave Mary Magdalen, after the mediator of a new covenant had mediated between them; how Simon the Cyrenian, and Joseph of Arimathea, and the beggar Bartimeus comforted each other, gave each other strength, common force, com-fort, when the One Life flowed in all their veins; how on board the ship the Tent-Maker proved to be Captain, and the Centurion learned his duty from his Prisoner, and how they “All came safe to shore,” because the New Life was there.  But as I preached, I caught Frye’s eye.  Frye is always critical; and I said to myself, “Frye would not take his illustrations from eighteen hundred years ago.”  And I saw dear old Dod Dalton trying to keep awake, and Campbell hard asleep after trying, and Jane Masury looking round to see if her mother did not come in; and Ezra Sheppard, looking, not so much at me, as at the window beside me, as if his thoughts were the other side of the world.  And I said to them all, “O, if I could tell you, my friends, what every twelve hours