have returned it! Oh John! I hav'nt had a happy moment since I left her! But she's dead now no doubt, and I shall never live to see her again, or she me. what shall I do ?"

Oh

"You can't do better now than be sorry; and pray to God to forgive you, and determine what you will do to make amends if you go back and find her.”

"Yes, yes, I know; Oh it all comes of resisting good feelings, which I had then, and letting temptation have its way; it all comes of that: you don't know how that red coat did lay hold of me !"

He

For several days Dennis paid unremitting attention to his young patient, and between going to Sally's husband, whose recovery seemed highly doubtful, his time was fully occupied. Robert was continually fretting about home thoughts which retarded his progress -his forsaken relative he knew must by this time be either in her grave, or bent beneath crushing penury ; the duty that he owed her for her kind and self-denying care of him during the hours of his childhood, became indeed a cause to him of the bitterest regret. formed a hundred plans and resolutions in the weary hours of illness in the Russian hospital, of returning to make amends for his unhappy conduct. Illness does indeed bring a man to himself, and while we sit abject and forlorn in the hour of destitution or decrepitude, we see that the objects of our desires are but husks after all, fit for swine to eat; and that in our FATHER's house alone, are objects worthy of pursuit. “I will arise and go to my FATHER" is the cry of the healthy minded from the pillow of suffering, and however long may be

the way to our FATHER'S house, we shall bear up with courage along its difficult course. That way Robert determined to walk, and his determination was confirmed and strengthened by many a word of comfort and instruction from John Dennis, whose honest mind made no hesitation in imparting to him in full, the Christian instruction he had received at school.

press

It was part of the trial of the young recruit, that the chance of restitution seemed so very faint. Upon how many must that same conviction with awful power who are now engaged in the war, when they recollect a neglected parent, or an ill treated wife, or a forsaken child; how keen the anguish when no communication can be made or received, to feel that the grave may close over the object of our regret, before we can perform one act of restitution for the past. But as John Dennis often said to Robert, "The best way to get God to give us a chance of restitution is the determination to make it when the chance is given." How wonderful would this world look if we knew all that was going on at this same moment.

There on the 15th of October, lay Robert Watson, imagining the parish coffin with its gaping lid, the unfollowed funeral, and the shallow grave; the last home of the forsaken widow; and as he thought a tear ran down his face, and he clasped his hands in earnest prayer, he said, "O GOD Almighty, pardon mine offence and give me another chance," while John Dennis, taking out his Bible, read the story of the fig-tree spared one year more. And Sally's husband,

Y

with his emaciated cheek leaning on his hand, turned towards where the young soldier read his Bible to his comrade, eager to catch something that he might understand, or that might belong to him, and sank back saying "Oh it's a fine thing to be a scholar, but I never had a head-piece."

And at the same moment, sitting by a little narrow bed, in a room with twenty old women, sat the widow Hughes; she was not dead, nor did she live where Robert left her; but her two grey eyes which used to fill with tears of love for her little grand-child had now assumed a paler hue, as stone blindness had crept over her ever feeble vision and as she sat there on a box, her wrinkled hands quivered with the blue arteries of ebbing life; she leant upon the hooked stick which Robert had known so well in days gone by, and as her sightless eye-balls wandered as if round the room, she would get up, for she had sat there for listless hours, and say, as she hobbled towards the other end of the room that had now become her world, "Ah! GOD bless him, he was always a good boy to me. I wonder if he is alive now! They say them Russians be terrible folk to the white people; may be I shall never see his dear eyes again and that's certain. But to hear his voice once more, Oh God, how glad I should be!" and so saying she paused and sat down upon another box to hear Mrs. Cripps tell for the hundredth time her dreadful stories of the great war, when she was young, and all that happened to her as she followed her husband, a soldier in the Peninsula.

I anticipate, but never mind, if we could see the end

of our actions, how often we should be encouraged to act more vigorously.

It was Christmas eve, and through December the widow's strength had gradually broken down, she was going out to sea like water that runneth apace, she was reaching her journey's end as a post that hasteth away. There was no one near to care about her, and as she said "she was a trouble to everybody;" and except it might be that her boy was yet alive, there wasn't a soul that would not be glad to see her dead and buried, and she had no wish to live: why should she? for after all life is but a composition of many elements: love, beauty, the future, hope, expectation, gratified aim, satisfied yearnings. They are life; but when they are all gone, and their bright colours bleached out of the figure of our existence by the drenching rains and the winter wind of change and chance, what have we left? except to long to close the eye upon the now colourless phantom of time, and to open it perchance upon some other scene in eternity, where the colours never fade, and the shattered elements of earthly happiness are restored in endless life.

And so the widow thought, though in simpler ideas. A few crosser words than usual that afternoon from the nurse, a rough sentence that her ear caught from the master of the union, asking whether the old widow "wasn't gone yet;" the quick passage of the doctor's footstep as he passed unnoticing her bed, having said "that nothing more could be done for her, except nourishment;" and a remark made half an hour ago by the woman in the next bed, "Ah mother Hughes,

the sooner we are gone the better, for they want our room :" were all the occurrences of the day.

These remarks had not been calculated to make life dearer to widow Hughes, and she had begun to say her evening prayers, for poor old soul, she always said them with her hands clasped under the sheet, as regu larly as the evening came round, and she was praying for her boy, as she called him, "GOD Almighty bless my Robert if he is alive," when a footstep rapidly passing along the passage, announced a stranger's coming. She stopped in her prayers, and fixed her sightless eyeballs on the door as one who having been long watching at an open window through the hours of a weary winter's night for a loved one expected, but he comes not, and having twenty times mistaken creaking boughs and slamming gates, for the sign of the longed for approach, has become at length callous to sound and almost to care, and yet watches, and at length starts aside, hearing close beneath the casement the well-known footsteps: so she, I mean the widow, leaning forward from her pillow for a moment listened, and then cried out "It is my boy. 'Joseph my son is yet alive, I shall go to see him before I die.'” In another moment Robert Watson had clasped to his soldier breast the dear old face, and gazing, for he could not speak, on the sightless eyes he used to love so dearly, looked and wept, and looked again; and then with faltering voice cried out, "O GOD, I thank Thee, Thou hast spared the barren tree one year more."

"Yes, Robert, and if it bear fruit, well-O Robert, Robert, my bonny boy," cried the widow, "who would