him out to talk to him.  ‘No,’ said an Edinburgh boy to his mother the other day—­’No, mother,’ he said, ’I have no liking for these Sunday papers with their poor stories and their pictures.  I am to read the Bible stories and the Bible biographies first.’  He is not my boy.  I wish my boys were all like him.  ’And Plutarch on week-days for such a boy,’ I said to his mother.  How to keep a decent shred of the old sanctification on the modern Sabbath-day is the anxious inquiry of many fathers and mothers among us.  My friend with her manly-minded boy, and Mr. Meditation with little Think-well had no trouble in that matter.

         ’And once I said,
   As I remember, looking round upon those rocks
   And hills on which we all of us were born,
   That God who made the Great Book of the world
   Would bless such piety;—­
   Never did worthier lads break English bread: 
   The finest Sunday that the autumn saw,
   With all its mealy clusters of ripe nuts,
   Could never keep those boys away from church,
   Or tempt them to an hour of Sabbath breach,
   Leonard and James!’

Think-well and that mother’s son.

Old Mr. Meditation, the father, was sprung of a poor but honest and industrious stock in the city.  He had not had many talents or opportunities to begin with, but he had made the very best of the two he had.  And then, when the two estates of Mr. Fritter-day and Mr. Let-good-slip were sequestered to the crown, the advisers of the crown handed over those two neglected estates to Mr. Meditation to improve them for the common good, and after him to his son, whose name we know.  The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord, and He delighteth in his way.  I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.

Now, this Think-well old Mr. Meditation had by Mrs. Piety, and she was the daughter of the old Recorder.  ‘I am Thy servant,’ said Mrs. Piety’s son on occasion all his days—­’I am Thy servant and the son of Thine handmaid.’  And at that so dutiful acknowledgment of his a long procession of the servants of God pass up before our eyes with their sainted mothers leaning on the arms of their great sons.  The Psalmist and his mother, the Baptist and his mother, our Lord and His mother, the author of the Fourth Gospel and his mother, Paul’s son and successor in the gospel and his mother and grandmother, the author of The Confessions and his mother; and, in this noble connection, I always think of Halyburton and his good mother.  And in this ennobling connection you will all think of your own mother also, and before we go any further you will all say, I also, O Lord, am Thy servant and the son of Thine handmaid.  ‘Fathers and mothers handle children differently,’ says Jeremy Taylor.  And then that princely teacher of the Church of Christ Catholic goes on to tell us how Mrs. Piety handled her little Think-well which she had