NOTES UPON MINISTERS' WIVES.

45

I would refer to the beautiful presents sent by His Highness the Khedive of Egypt, whose father also gave the floating Bethel at Alexandria for the benefit of sailors.

Here is the model of the s.s. “ Pembroke Castle,” in which the Prime Minister and party visited Copenhagen. Everything is for sale. Surely the gentlemen will not harden their hearts, but yield to the innocent solicitations of the ladies, and buy the few remaining things.

Mr. Samuel Linder (Director) expressed the thanks of the Board to the Civic party in one of his telling little speeches of well-chosen words, instinct with feeling.

“My DEAR SIR.-I send you a copy of the Lord Mayor's letter to Sir Henry Ponsonby, and in doing so I may tell you that the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, and the Sheriffs, were intensely gratified by the warmth of the reception accorded them, not only at your Institute, but throughout the entire length of the route. His Lordship trusts that the result of the meeting may be of financial value to your Society.-Yours truly, Mansion House.

“H. T. SOULSBY."*

NOTES UPON MINISTERS' WIVES.

(Continued from page 13.) MITTLE Mary trotted in from school, and the visit closed.

Mr. Forde was no believer in walking through his “parish,” note-book in hand, and triumphantly recording

at the close of a visiting day, “ Visited twenty-three families and prayed in each."

Poor families !-still poorer prayers !

With the unvarying ebb-tide of a strong religious excitement, many of those who, by persuasion, or from spasmodic personal anxiety, had been hearing the Word, now proved that they had no root, and therefore withered away. That such a result was only to be anticipated, was no comfort to Mr. Forde. Like every earnest minister, he hoped against hope, and would have been thankful had the Lord been better to him than his fears. In a brother minister's Church, at a Communion some time previously, ninetynine were admitted to membership on one evening. A worthy office-bearer could not curb his enthusiasm, and rose without preface to announce as the only hymn of praise suitable for the joyous occasion, “There were ninety and nine who safely lay, in the shelter of the fold.” On enquiry, not long afterwards, the brother shook his head despondingly, “ I believe I can trace nine,” he said ; “ of the ninety I can give no account.”

Unless a man is yoked by God to the plough, the harnessing of the human husbandman is apt to be easily broken.

Mr. Forde, and still more his wife, were contemplating rather sadly this lapsed condition of things. She was prone, like all women to judge too much by externals—the very fault which makes it difficult for them to be wise visitors among the poor. They do too much of the talking themselves, and are readier to teach than to guide.

Hilda knew the disappointments which led up to a sermon on the text “ toiling in rowing, for the wind was contrary,” and took to herself the lesson of patient continuance in well-doing, even when the result seemed to be only personal fatigue.

The very day after sermon, Mr. Forde was sent for to visit Pat Mehary, whose little girls, Mary and Bridget, were in Hilda's class. Paralysed by hardships more than age, he was bed-ridden, and his wife earned the bread of the family. A very delicate older daughter and a clever lad, but with indications of excitability, destined to grow with his growth, completed the household. Mary had all her father's originality and sense of humour. A more apt or congenial pupil could hardly have been found. The others, Hilda characterised as “groany disciples.” God's stormy days are so much fewer than His sunshiny ones, that His children ought to sing Hallelujahs more frequently than intone Misereres. The more so, as they can alter very little-except themselves.

Like most sea-faring men, Pat was never happy when on dry land, and though, to do him justice, he provided with all a sailor's proverbial liberality for those of his own household, he was in his home as little as a decent man well could be. It was therefore a most unlooked-for and disturbing element in their daily life, when his wife and children woke up by slow degrees to the fact that all poor Pat's voyages were over. “ Father” had been wont to disturb Mrs. Mehary's little domestic arrangements with all a seaman's recklessness, and his joviality always so infected the children (with the one exception of “poor old hippy,” as he invariably designated his first born), that to bring them back to the proper subdued condition, which was their mother's boast and aim, sorely tried her not very tolerant disposition. “A decent woman, well-meaning, thoroughly so, and hard-working," a district visitor had once said of her. Hard-featured and hard-natured would have completed the picture. She was attentive to her husband, according to her light, and when she was at home, which came to be very seldom. True to her character, she set herself to keep a roof over their heads and earn food for the bairns. So Pat exchanged the ceaseless sobbing of the surging sea for the less congenial sighs of his girl Anne.

In looking after Bridget and Mary, Hilda first met him, and was much interested in the long yarns which were such a relief to him.

“Aye, aye,” he said one day when she called again, a little in despite of her own theory, that a minister's wife should have no pets among her husband's people. Somehow it did come to the turn of the Mehary's very often. “Aye, aye, mem dear, but 'tis a bad thing to live too long. People's don't mean it, and they'll not feel it, till their own time comes. But when it comes to lying still, 'cos you can't move, and just taking what you can get, 'cos you can't get nothing else, and you hears’em awhispering about ‘fidgetting and fussing. It's may be what parson calls the grace of patience as they'se exercising, but I know it's what I'm exercising all the time, and it keeps me mortal busy to hold in like. But then it ain't manly to lash out on a pack of 'oomen, poor things, as is a doing of their best, and a poor sort of best it often is. But thinks I sometimes as I lies here, and it takes me ever so long to prize off a bit o' baccy with them shaky fingers of mine, nobody should live longer than they can work. It's a bad job for a vessel to be laid up in ordinary. When she's come back from her last voyage, the sooner the old hulk's broke up into firewood, the better.”

Hilda took an opportunity of quietly speaking to Bridget and Mary. Anne was a hopeless case, she felt. Whatever of brightness she might have had in early girlhood, she was now too engrossed in the daily consideration of her own aches and pains, to do more than the very least that she could escape with. But by a little management, the other two were guided into an easy way of dividing the care of their father between them, and education (of two kinds) was still possible for both.

“ Hilda,” said Mr. Forde, as they sat together one evening over a late supper, he recounting, as was ever his wont, to her ear alone, the events of the day. “I don't think the Quakers are so far wrong after all, when they tolerate women preachers,” and he looked up mischievously,

“Two of a trade, you know," she rejoined. “Your favourite, Mrs. Fry, did all the talking, but her husband was nowhere! He lent her his name, and that seemed nearly all his object in life! I don't think you would take kindly to driving tandem, with your wife for the leader."

“My dear!” he said in a tone of remonstrance, “as if all the world did not know that you write all my good sermons for me! However, that's not a charge that it would be possible to bring against many of your clerical sisters. So you can quite afford to let it pass.”

“It always amuses me though,” said Hilda. “ The unconscious

picture of moral dishonesty is so beautifully simple. To think of a man moved by the Holy Ghost to the office of the Christian ministry, and then taking his sermons from-anybody! The parson who would dare stand up, and go through the discourse of another minister as if it were his own, might well thank the great Head of the Church, that the age of miracles is understood to be over. The sin of Ananias and Sapphira seems to me light in comparison. Could such a pious thief kneel down with his wife on Sunday morning, I wonder, and ask God to inspire his thoughts, and bless his words from the pulpit that day? His only possible exclamation could be, ‘Alas, Master, for it is borrowed !'”

“Where ignorance is bliss, Hilda—," said her husband. “A man may preach with stammering tongue, but it must be what the Lord saith-individually—to him, as He did to Micaiah, the son of Imlah that he must speak. But what struck me to-day, was old Pat's interest in Mary's account of your lesson in class last Sunday. I doubt if any one of my congregation could have recalled my morning sermon as faithfully as she did yours.”

“Oh! but I hand her over my notes to read to her father," · Hilda answered. “It does not give me much more trouble, and you know, now they take it in turns to come to me Sunday by Sunday. The one who is at class stays with Pat in the evening, and goes over the lesson with him. Bridget can't sing as well as Mary, but 'the Lord aint as partickler as to the toon,' Pat says, 'as some on His people be. Whatever we sing is repeated, too, so he gets the good of it all, he tells me.”

“ Poor Pat !” said Mr. Forde, “that's how he had almost got hold of your very words, then. He asked me to-day to read him the account of the crucifixion in St. Mark's Gospel. I was going to remark on the fact, that the cross then, as now, divided the world into two classes—those who receive and those who revile Christ. “Ay, ay,' he said, as he always does, and went on as fast as he could get out the words, it seems a’mos owdacious like of that ere blackguard as had been thieving and murdering till the poliss cotched him, and the end of his rope was payed out, to think of his darin' to put up a prayer at all! The likes o' him. And just to think now how neat it was answered. He say—“Lord, remember me !” And the blessed Jesus He says—“Verily," and He's dead in earnest when He says that. And the poor scamp goes on “Remember me," and the blessed Jesus says “On course I can't forget ye, 'cos yer'll be with Me." And he says, “When Thou comest to Thy kingdom," and he gets for answer, “in Paradise.” An' he thinks to his self, “ Then I'll be in luck some day.” So the dear Lord just knows his thought, and says “ Then it'll be to-day.”

Pof your very crucifixion the cross th

I've been lying athinking of it all over, your Riverence, and now I sees it. At the last gasp, sir, and I'm near that, for when a man's in the way all round, the sooner he shifts his anchorage the better, and gets into a harbour where he won't be stranded. But the big vessels lying out at anchor in the bay, has a little boat that rows ashore, and helps to vittle 'em for the voyage. And my gals, sir—thanks to the missus-is just a doing all they can, to start me off fair for my last voyage. It blows a capful of wind sometimes, and I get tossed about a bit, but all's hauled up tight and trim, and so it don't do the old craft much harm. I looks to my sailing orders, and ports the helm when my captain tells me. Wasn't it when Jesus got into the ship, sir, that the wind ceased, and there was a great calm ? That's where I am now.”

Husband and wife sat quietly, hand-in-hand, for some minutes after Ambrose Forde finished Pat's profession of faith. Together they knelt down, and gave thanks for any share that had been permitted them in guiding the worn out soul to the perfect rest. That night another seizure rendered him speechless, but his eyes opened when Mr. Forde entered his sick room, and tears crossed over his rough, now whitened cheeks, as Hilda laid her hand over his outstretched stiff fingers, and softly said, “Leave thy fatherless children with me.” Apparently he understood the double sense in which she intended it. As the day wore on, he seemed to watch the door anxiously, Mrs. Mehary was in charge of a house at some distance for a family on the Continent, and all was uncertainty as to how she could answer to the summons. Darkness closed in ; Pat grew perceptibly feebler. Late in the evening Mr. Forde called again, and just as he knelt at the bedside, with the girls and the boy, who had turned up too late for a word from his dying father, the wife hurried in. Her unrepressed wailing seemed to disturb him. They had been uncertain as to whether enough intelligence remained to follow prayer. But, as she hung over him weeping bitterly, he moved, opened his eyes, they wandered feebly from one to another rested a moment on Mrs. Forde, and then, with a strange bright smile, as his pet Mary, who had yielded her place at his head for her mother, stole softly to the foot of his bed in his full view, passed quietly away.

With that marvellous appropriateness which gives the old Psalms of David so much power, Mr. Forde gave out, ere they lifted Pat to his last resting place, the one verse

“I will both lay me down in peace

And quiet sleep will take,
Because Thou only me to dwell

In safety, Lord, dost make.”
From the Presbyterian Churchman.—(By Mrs. James Martin, Belfast).