not until Sunday evening, as he lay listlessly watching his scanty allowance of daylight grow dimmer, that he became sure of the hand that he had detected in the workmanship of the piece.  He got up quickly and looked at it more closely and said:  “It must be Isa Marlay!” And he lay down again, saying:  “Well, it can never be quite dark in a man’s life when he has one friend.”  And then, as the light grew more and more faint, he said:  “Why did not I see it before?  Good orthodox Isa wants to preach to me.  She means to say that I should receive light through the cross.”

And he lay awake far into the night, trying to divine how the flower-pots and pictures and all the rest could have been sent all the way from Metropolisville.  It was not till long afterward that he discovered the alliance between Whisky Jim and Isabel, and how Jim had gotten a friend on the Stillwater route to help him get them through.  But Charlton wrote Isa, and told her how he had detected her, and thanked her cordially, asking her why she concealed her hand.  She replied kindly, but with little allusion to the gifts, and they came no more.  When Isa had been discovered she could not bring herself to continue the presents.  Save that now and then there came something from his mother, in which Isa’s taste and skill were evident, he received nothing more from her, except an occasional friendly letter.  He appreciated her delicacy too late, and regretted that he had written about the cross at all.

One Sunday, Mr. Lurton, going his round, found Charlton reading the New Testament.

“Mr. Lurton, what a sublime prayer the Pater-noster is!” exclaimed Charlton.

“Yes;” said Lurton, “it expresses so fully the only two feelings that can bring us to God—­a sense of guilt and a sense of dependence.”

“What I admired in the prayer was not that, but the unselfishness that puts God and the world first, and asks bread, forgiveness, and guidance last.  It seems to me, Mr. Lurton, that all men are not brought to God by the same feelings.  Don’t you think that a man may be drawn toward God by self-sacrifice—­that a brave, heroic act, in its very nature, brings us nearer to God?  It seems to me that whatever the rule may be, there are exceptions; that God draws some men to Himself by a sense of sympathy; that He makes a sudden draft on their moral nature—­not more than they can bear, but all they can bear—­and that in doing right under difficulties the soul finds itself directed toward God—­opened on the side on which God sits.”

Mr. Lurton shook his head, and protested, in his gentle and earnest way, against this doctrine of man’s ability to do anything good before conversion.

“But, Mr. Lurton,” urged Albert, “I have known a man to make a great sacrifice, and to find himself drawn by that very sacrifice into a great admiring of Christ’s sacrifice, into a great desire to call God his father, and into a seeking for the forgiveness and favor that would make him in some sense a child of God.  Did you never know such a case?”