able to enjoy the delights of the House and of the season, but so pained in his bowels and so pulled together with inward pains, that he sometimes cried out as if he were being torn to pieces.  At that moment Mr. Skill, the ancient physician, entered the sick-room, when, having a little observed Matthew’s intense agony, with a certain mixture of goodness and severity he recited these professional verses over the trembling bed: 

   “O conscience, who can stand against thy power? 
   Endure thy gripes and agonies one hour? 
   Stone, gout, strappado, racks, whatever is
   Dreadful to sense, are only toys to this—­
   No pleasures, riches, honours, friends can tell
   How to give ease to this, ’tis like to hell.”

And then, turning to the sick man’s mother, who stood at the bed’s head wringing her hands, the ancient leech said to her:  “This boy of yours has been tampering with the forbidden fruit!” At which the angry mother turned on the well-approved physician as if he had caused all the trouble that he had come to cure.  But the ancient man knew both the son and the mother too, and therefore he addressed her with some asperity:  “I tell you both that strong measures must be taken instantly, else he will die.”  When Mr. Skill had seen that the first purge was too weak, he made him one to the purpose; and it was made, as he so learnedly said, ex carne et sanguine Christi.  The pills were to be taken three at a time, fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of the tears of repentance.  After some coaxing, such as mothers know best how to use, Matthew took the medicine and was soon walking about again with a staff, and was able to go from room to room of the hospitable and happy house.  Understandest thou what thou readest? said Philip the deacon to Queen Candace’s treasurer as he sat down beside him in the chariot and opened up to him the fifty-third of the prophet Isaiah.  And, understandest thou what thou here readest in Matthew and Mr. Skill?

1.  Now, on this almost too closely veiled case I shall venture to remark, in the first place, that multitudes of boys grow up into young men, and go out of our most godly homes and into a whole world of temptation without due warning being given them as to where they are going.  “I do marvel that none did warn him of it,” said Mr. Skill, with some anger.  What Matthew’s father might have done in this matter had he been still in this world when his son became a man in it we can only guess.  As it was, it never entered his mother’s too fond mind to take her fatherless boy by himself when she saw Beelzebub’s orchard before him, and tell him what Solomon told his son, and to point out to him the prophecy that King Lemuel’s mother prophesied to her son.  Poor Matthew was a young man before his mother was aware of it.  And, poor woman, she only found that out when Mr. Skill was in the sick-room and was looking at her with eyes that seemed to say to her that she had murdered her