from some unaccountable misgivings respecting the nature of his new employment, or more probably from the secret wish which he still indulged of going to London, was overcome by his feelings, and burst into tears. The father, turning round and seeing this, exclaimed, in a tone of affectionate kindness, which was never afterwards forgotten by the object of it, "Why, Tom, you're crying; I see you don't want to go, and you shan't go." He had put the true construction upon the lad's tears, and the engagement was abandoned. They returned home, to the infinite surprise of the mother; and the ordinary avocations of the farm were once more resumed. At length a situation was found for him at Lambeth as an assistant in a counting-house. His small bundle of clothes was put together by his mother. He could easily carry it. She commended him to God with tears, and, giving him a few shillings, bade him farewell. In this seemingly unpropitious manner he left home for London in 1786, when only fourteen years old, little supposing that after a lapse of half a century he would become Lord Mayor. He did not remain long at Lambeth; his master became bankrupt but procured him a place as shopman at a bookseller's in Paternoster Row. Here the terms of his engagement were those of an ordinary servant. He was to board and lodge, and to have £10 per annum. A day's trial was agreed upon; and at its close he told the housekeeper he would go to Lambeth for his clothes, sleep there, and return in time for morning business. When the master heard this, he replied, "Depend on it, you'll see no more of him; he's had enough of it already." But Kelly was at the door before the shop was opened. He crossed the threshold the instant the shutters were down. 'And," said he after a lapse of sixty years, "I have been there ever since." The shop was kept by Alexander Hogg, and was at 16, Paternoster Row. A considerable book business was done. His duty was to make up parcels of new works for the retail buyers. But every leisure moment he spent in forwarding his own studies, and aloud to the housekeeper. He began now to learn French, and soon could read it with fluency. It appears that it was thought requisite for the security of the premises that some one should sleep in the shop; and the unenviable responsibility was imposed on poor Kelly. Thus the monotonous routine of his daily tasks went unrelieved by any change of air or scene during the night. The very counter upon which he enacted the business of the day served for his canopy during the hours of repose; while immediately beneath the floor on which he lay, as he afterwards discovered when the premises came into his own possession, was a noxious cesspool. A state of things more calculated to have a depressing effect on mind and body it were scarcely possible to conceive; but that inflexible perseverance which appears never to have forsaken him, and, above all, a prayerful trust in and submission to the will of God in all that concerned him, carried him hopefully through all his difficulties. When, after the lapse of years, he could place in favourable juxtaposition with these his early struggles the accumulated blessings of a long life, he ever acknowledged the Divine source from whence he had received those blessings, and endeavoured to extract from the contrast subjects for meditation and thankfulness. Mrs. Best, the housekeeper, a kind, conscientious woman, was his only society. He took his meals with her, and she would never allow him to perform any menial work. He had at this time an enemy in an elder fellow-servant. "Well," said Mr. Hogg, to this fellowservant, "how is Kelly getting on?” "I don't think he'll do for us; he's so slow." "I like him," answered Hogg, emphatically, "he's a biddable boy." This reply of the master's may serve to show upon what apparently trifling circumstances, humanly speaking, a man's future prospects in life depend. Kelly remembered it as long as he lived; and used to mention it as having furnished him, at the time, with renewed motives for activity and obedience. The sequel to the story, as it respects his fellow-servant, naturally suggests the question, "slow," as he had intimated, the latter had not proved himself too quick and observant for his own malpractices. Some little time after the above occurrence, Kelly discovered him stealing his master's property; and, after a temporary struggle between the stern requirements of duty to his master, on the one hand, and commiseration for the guilty party, on the other, he at length divulged the secret. The man was accordingly watched. Emboldened by previous success, and soon repeating the offence, he was detected in the act of taking from the premises a number of books concealed under his clothes. The reader will anticipate the retribution which awaited him. The unoffending object of his dislike had been made the instrument of his detection; and now, the punishment inflicted upon him bore its proper relation to the injury he had wished to inflict upon young Kelly. He was dismissed from the establishment. Thus, "in the same net that he hid privily for another was his own foot taken" (Ps. ix. 15). His anxiety about business led at this period to strange feats of sleep-walking. Eighty distinct numbers of the "Book of Martyrs" were found on a shelf in the shop. Of these he made up a complete set in his sleep, arranging them on the counter in the same way as he did in the daytime. Another night he unfastened the locks of two doors, went into the street, and was found by the watch fast asleep. Once, on his road to Spitalfields on business, he saw what seemed waste-paper in a cheesemonger's window, and recognised some printed sheets as his master's property. He entered the shop and found the shelves filled up with the same sort of paper. This had been bought as damaged "stock" by the tradesman; but it proved to be sheets sent out by Mr. Hogg to be stitched, and clandestinely sold. The guilty parties were tried and convicted. When the Alderman was very old, he said,— "This being my first appearance as a witness in a court of justice, I felt (more than words can express) an extreme fear lest I should state a single word incorrectly, being fully impressed with the sacred obligation of an oath; ever remembering the Third Commandment of God's law; and always desirous to possess a conscience void of offence towards God and towards all men. Little did I then think, when humbly trembling in the witness box, that at a future day I was destined to be raised to the dignity of Her Majesty's First Commissioner of the Central Criminal Court of England; and with the sword of justice suspended over my head, and the mace of authority placed at my feet, should myself occupy the very judgment-seat at which I then glanced with such emotion." In its brightest hours; Sadly whispering, "Only Let Thy will be ours! Some of us were tired In its summer days: Weary, we desired Now the Year is over, Let us braver stand, Seeking to discover His-our Father's-hand: Let us 66 follow wholly," Though our sight be dim: He would make us holy, For a life with Him. Every day He sends us Home Makers, and How they Made them. BY MRS. CLARA L. BALFOUR. 1. HOME AND LOVE.-ANDREW AND MARTHA REED.- VERYTHING that is worth having in this world requires effort to gain or to keep. Our Heavenly Father made love of mind, or body, or both, the condition of virtuous and noble human life. As a people, we consider ourselves fond of domestic institutions, and there are no words of four letters in our language that rouse more feeling and suggest more thought than the two words HOME and LOVE. What mind that thinks, and what heart that feels, but must admit that the truest joy is comprehended in those little words? And they are kindred words, for there can be no real Home without Love. They make up the complement of each other, and blend as two drops of dew that touch make one. Our Divine Master always treats us as intelligent beings, and makes the amount of our chief earthly treasures to depend in a great degree on ourselves. Thus the HOME requires making, just as the garden requires cultivating. Neither will grow and flourish without effort: God alone gives the increase, but we must give the toil and watchfulness. In this day, when so much is said of woman's influence, and so many demands are made by and for her in the way of culture and employment, I have feared there was some danger of forgetting one employment for which God and nature have specially fitted her, that of being not merely a Home occupier but a Home maker. Let none think lightly of this domestic ing of the olden times have gone from the housewife; but still the true wife and mother weaves the web of comfort in the dwelling, and spins the threads of love that bind together the hearts of the household. The Home mainly is what the wife and mother makes it. "That is a hard sentence," says some dear, tired, toil-worn sister among my readers. Yes, it is hard; for truth is seldom soft and life to workers, whether man or woman, is seldom easy. The young wife enters on her new home so full of love and hope, that she sometimes makes her lot all the harder by forgetting that there will, and must be, hardships of some kind-trials of temper, of circumstances, from which none are wholly exempt, and which will need wisdom and patience, and the Divine guidance that prayer brings to human infirmity, to bear with and overcome. "The kindest and the happiest pair It is a good rule to think of what we owe to others in the home, rather than of what they owe to us. Doing our duty is way to teach others to do theirs. the What wonderful instances of Home makers among wives and mothers are to be found in the pages of Biography. The traveller by the Brighton Railway passes a building that is one of the evidences of our national Christianity-the "Earlswood Idiot Asylum." "What," says my kind reader, " I can that have to do with the subject of these pages ?" Well, it has founded by Dr. Andrew Reed, who passed his life in works of philanthropy; and nothing in the personal history of that truly benevolent man is more beautiful than the record of his early life, and the piety and excellence of the sweet mother who made the house a Home for his childhood and youth. Mrs. Martha Reed was early in life an orphan, and had been deprived of property left to her. Happily she had that which she could not be defrauded of; an enlightened mind, a lovely spirit, and for the time in which she lived a good education. She gained employment in teaching; and being zealous in good works, used her brief leisure in visiting the sick. Once she was praying by a sick woman, when her prayer was heard in an adjoining room by a young man who was a Sabbath-school teacher visiting the parents of a scholar. The two good young people met, and their intimacy led to a union, holy and happy in every sense. They were far from rich. In these days they would be called poor. Both had to toil to "provide things honest in the sight of all men," and to make the Home. Mr. Reed was a watchmaker, and his workshop was at the top of the house, while his young wife kept a day-school on the first floor. Andrew was the third child of this union, and the only son who survived infancy. The good wife was as good a mother. How she taught, and watched, and prayed with and for her boy! That home was indeed an abode of hallowed love. The husband and father was like-minded with his brave wife, and their son ever spoke of his childhood as full of happiness. At length the house near Temple Bar in which they lived was to be pulled down; and Mrs. Reed's spirit being full of zeal, she wished her husband to devote himself to missionary work, which was then much needed in and round London. She urged his doing it; and that he might be released from pecuniary cares, she underoook to keep the home. She says in her journal-"I begin to entreat my husband to do something for Christ. A missionary spirit seems to run through the Christian Church, and among the rest my heart is in the enterprise." She took a house, No. 68, Chiswell Street, and opened a china and glass warehouse. There, as her grandsons say, "This brave woman vended her earthenware for many years, and Divine Providence prospered her greatly." It is not wonderful that the son of such a woman should have had the rich inheritance of her virtues. It was once said of a very gifted lady that "To know her was a good education." It may truly be said, that to have had such a mother and father, was to be nobly born. The mother made a Home where her son's heart was nurtured, and his soul expanded heavenward. As years advanced, he evidenced his love to God by love to his fellow-creatures; and Orphan Asylums-Houses for IncurablesSailors' Homes-" Earlswood"-"Reedham". -are the Homes which the son of that good mother made-offshoots from the root of her piety. Few can hope for such results, but all can work in her spirit. (To be continued.) GOLD FROM THE MINE. "GOD IS ABLE." "GOD is able" to blot out all thy sins. It is true thou art not able to blot out one, not even to undo one: but "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin "-cleanseth from sins even in the sight of a holy, heart "A SURFACE RELIGION." A surface religion costs men little, and satisfies them easily. True religion lays low the sinner, exalts the Saviour, and promotes holiness of life. No cross, no crown! No battle, no victory! There is an open road to Wandering Down. 66 BY THE REV. HORATIUS BONAR, D.D., AUTHOR OF HYMNS OF FAITH AND HOPE." E are wandering down life's shady path, Slowly, slowly wandering down; We are wandering down life's rugged path, Slowly, slowly wandering down. Morn, with its store of buds and dew, Lies far behind us now; Morn, with its wealth of song and light, Lies far behind us now. 'Tis the mellow flush of sunset now, 'Tis the hour of silent trust; 'Tis the solemn hue of fading skies, 'Tis the time of tranquil trust. We shall rest in yon low valley soon, There to sleep our toil away; We shall rest in yon sweet valley soon, There to sleep our tears away. Laid side by side with those we love, We shall rise and put on glory When the great morn shall dawn; We shall rise and put on beauty When the glad morn shall dawn. We shall mount to you fair city, The dwelling of the blest; We shall meet the many parted ones, In that dear home of joy. We have shared our earthly sorrows, We have mingled tears together, Up to the end of 1872 no less than 3204 new churches have been built during the present century. In addition to these, 925 churches have been entirely rebuilt. The |