“Is he still alive?”

“God preserve him for many a year yet!  I’ll only require to speak his name”—­and when he had done so, I knew the secret spring of thankfulness that fed the never-ceasing charity of one great, good man.

“And yet, John,” I urged, “how can spirit speak with spirit?”

“‘How?’ I will tell thee, that word ‘how’ has no business in the mouth of a child of God.  When I was a boy, who had dreamed ‘how’ men in London might speak with men in Edinburgh through the air, invisible and unheard?  That is a matter of trade now.  Can thou imagine what subtle secret lines there may be between the spiritual world and this world?”

“But dreams, John?”

“Well, then, dreams.  Take the dream life out of thy Bible and, oh, how much thou wilt lose!  All through it this side of the spiritual world presses close on the human side.  I thank God for it.  Yes, indeed!  Many things I hear and see which say to me that Christians now have a kind of shame in what is mystical or supernatural.  But thou be sure of this—­the supernaturalism of the Bible, and of every Christian life is not one of the difficulties of our faith, it is the foundation of our faith.  The Bible is a supernatural book, the law of a supernatural religion; and to part with this element is to lose out of it the flavor of heaven, and the hope of immortality.  Yes, indeed!”

This conversation occurred thirty years ago.  Two years since, I met the man who had experienced such a deliverance, and he told me again the wonderful story, and showed me the pencil sketch which he had made of John Balmuto in Donald Brae’s cottage.  He had painted from it a grand picture of his deliverer, wearing the long black camlet cloak and head-kerchief of the order of evangelists to which he belonged.  I stood reverently before the commanding figure, with its inspired eyes and rapt expression; for, during those thirty years, I also had learned that it was only those

    Who ne’er the mournful midnight hours
    Weeping upon their bed have sate,
    Who know you not, Ye Heavenly Powers.

SIX, AND HALF-A-DOZEN.

Slain in the battle of life.  Wounded and fallen, trampled in the mire and mud of the conflict, then the ranks closed again and left no place for her.  So she crawled aside to die.  With a past whose black despair was as the shadow of a starless night, a future which her early religious training lit up with the lurid light of hell, and the strong bands of a pitiless death dragging her to the grave—­still she craved, as the awful hour drew near, to see once more the home of her innocent childhood.  Not that she thought to die in its shelter—­any one who knew David Todd knew also that was a hopeless dream; but if, IF her father should say one pardoning word, then she thought it would help her to understand the love of God, and give her some strength to trust in it.