the passion of my Saviour; Lord’s day, creation, salvation, and my own.—­M.’  And then, on an utterly illegible page, this:  ’Jesus, Thy life and Thy words are a perpetual sermon to me.  I meditate on Thee all the day.  Make my memory a vessel of election.  Let all my thoughts be plain, honest, pious, simple, prudent, and charitable, till Thou art pleased to draw the curtain and let me see Thyself, O Eternal Jesu!’ If I had time I could tell you more about Think-well’s quaint old father.  But the above may be better than nothing about the rare old gentleman.

A great authority has said—­two great authorities have said in their enigmatic way, that a ‘dry light is ever the best.’  That may be so in some cases and to some uses, but nothing can be more sure than this, that the light that little Think-well got from his father’s head was excellently drenched in his mother’s heart.  The sweet moisture of his mother’s heart mixed up beautifully with his father’s drier head and made a fine combination in their one boy as it turned out.  Her minister, preaching on one occasion on my text for to-night, had said—­and she had such a memory for a sermon that she had never forgotten it, but had laid it up in her heart on the spot—­’As the philosopher’s stone,’ the old-fashioned preacher had said, ’turns all metals into gold, as the bee sucks honey out of every flower, and as the good stomach sucks out some sweet and wholesome nourishment out of whatever it takes into itself, so doth a holy heart, so far as sanctified, convert and digest all things into spiritual and useful thoughts.  This you may see in Psalm cvii. 43.’  And in her plain, silent, hidden, motherly way Mistress Piety adorned her old minister’s doctrine of the holy heart that he was always preaching about, till she shared her soft and holy heart with her son, as his father had shared his clear and deep, if too unlearned, head.

We have one grandmother at least signalised in the Bible; but no grandfather, so far as I remember.  But amends are made for that in the Holy War.  For Think-well would never have been the man he became had it not been for the old Recorder, his grandfather on his mother’s side.  Some superficial people said that there was too much severity in the old Recorder; but his grandson who knew him best, never said that.  He was the best of men, his grandson used to stand up for him, and say, I shall never forget the debt I owe him.  It was he who taught me first to make conscience of my thoughts.  Indeed, as for my secret thoughts, I had taken no notice of them till that summer afternoon walk home from church, when we sat down among the bushes and he showed me on the spot the way.  And I can say to his memory that scarce for one waking hour have I any day forgotten the lesson.  The lesson how to make a conscience, as he said, of all my thoughts about myself and about all my neighbours.  Such, then, were Think-well’s more immediate ancestors, and such was the inheritance that they all taken together had left him.