borne to Mr. Meditation.  After other things, she said this every night before she took sleep to her tired eyelids, this:  ’Oh give me grace to bring him up.  Oh may I always instruct him with diligence and meekness; govern him with prudence and holiness; lead him in the paths of religion and justice; never provoking him to wrath, never indulging him in folly, and never conniving at an unworthy action.  Oh sanctify him in his body, soul, and spirit.  Let all his thoughts be pure and holy to the Searcher of hearts; let his words be true and prudent before men; and may he have the portion of the meek and the humble in the world to come, and all through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ How could a son get past a father and a mother like that?  Even if, for a season, he had got past them, he would be sure to come back.  Only, their young Think-well never did get past his father and his mother.

There was not so much word of heredity in his day; but without so much of the word young Think-well had the whole of the thing.  And as time went on, and the child became more and more the father of the man, it was seen and spoken of by all the neighbours who knew the house, how that their only child had inherited all his father’s head, and all his mother’s heart, and then that he had reverted to his maternal grandfather in his so keen and quick sense of right and wrong.  All which, under whatever name it was held, was a most excellent outfit for our young gentleman.  His old father, good natural head and all, had next to no book-learning.  He had only two or three books that he read a hundred times over till he had them by heart.  And as he sighed over his unlettered lot he always consoled himself with a saying he had once got out of one of his old books.  The saying of some great authority was to this effect, that ’an old and simple woman, if she loves Jesus, may be greater than our great brother Bonaventure.’  He did not know who Bonaventure was, but he always got a reproof again out of his name.  Think-well, to his father’s immense delight, was a very methodical little fellow, and his father and he had orderly little secrets that they told to none.  Little secret plans as to what they were to read about, and think about, and pray about on certain days of the week and at certain hours of the day and the night.  You must not call the father an old pedant, for the fact is, it was the son who was the pedant if there was one in that happy house.  The two intimate friends had a word between them they called agenda.  And nobody but themselves knew where they had borrowed that uncouth word, what language it was, or what it meant.  Only in the old man’s tattered pocket-book there were things like this found by his minister after his death.  Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass case, and in old Mr. Meditation’s ramshackle hand:  ’Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday,