After a little while, the draft was missed and inquiries made.  It was found that this lad had been near the mailbag on the day when the missing letter had been put in it, that he was unusually well provided with money, and that he had suddenly disappeared.  Officers of justice were commissioned to find him.  They soon traced him to his new residence, charged him with his crime, which he at once confessed, and brought him back to meet the consequences of a judicial investigation.  After a short imprisonment he was released on bail, but still held to answer, and thus the case stands at present.  He must of course be convicted, but whether the penalty of the law will be inflicted in whole or in part, it will be for the Executive to say.

Meanwhile the circumstances suggest some thoughts which may be worth the reader’s attention.  This lad was a member of a Sunday school, but irregular in his attendance, and this latter fact may in some degree explain his wandering from the right path.  He might, indeed, have been a punctual attendant on his class, and still have fallen into this gross sin, but it is not at all probable.  And it is curious and instructive, that wherever any inmates of prisons, houses of refuge, or other places of the kind, are found to have been connected with Sunday-schools, it is nearly always stated in accompaniment that they attended only occasionally and rarely.

Again, how much weight is there in Job’s remarkable expression (ch. 31:5), I have made a covenant with my eyes!  The eye, the most active of our senses, is the chiefest inlet of temptation, and hence the apostle John specifies “the lust of the eyes” as a leading form or type of ordinary sins.  The lad in the case before us allowed his eye to dwell on the letter, until the covetous desire to appropriate it had grown into a fixed purpose.  Had he made the same covenant as Job, and turned his eye resolutely away as soon as he felt the first wrongful emotion in his heart, the result had been widely different.  But he rather imitated the unhappy Achan, who, in recounting his sin, says, “When I saw among the spoils a Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold, then I coveted them.”  A fool’s eyes soon lead his hands astray.

Here also we see the deceitfulness of the heart.  A mere boy of fifteen years, of good ordinary training, at least in part connected with a Sunday-school, and not prompted by any urgent bodily necessity, commits a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment.  Had any one foretold to him a week before even the possibility of this occurrence, how indignantly would he have spurned the very thought!  That he should become, and deservedly so, the inmate of a felon’s cell—­how monstrous the supposition!  Yet so it came to pass.  The heart is deceitful above all things, and he who trusts in it is “cursed.”  Multitudes find their own case the renewal of Hazael’s experience.  When Elijah told him the enormities he, when on the throne of Syria, would practice, he exclaimed—­“Is thy servant a dog that he should do these things?” He was not then, but he afterwards became just such a dog.