a little auberge, where we were to rest until sunrise. I was fatigued, and slept. In the morning, when we were again on the road, I resumed my arguments and entreaties, but as vainly as before. I with difficulty prevailed upon him to promise that he would delay the carrying out of his fatal resolve for two days after our arrival ; not that I had any definite end in view, I merely wished to gain time. It was still fine, but the sky was becoming overcast as we entered on a part of our road where the direction of the Quebec and Melbourne Railway, then just commenced, exactly coincided with the old route. Large stone "sleepers" lay across the way for a considerable distance, and although deeply covered with snow, still were able to produce a perceptible ruggedness, which compelled us often to move at a foot-pace, and even here and there a part of a large granite block would protrude altogether, having been thrown down in an irregular position, and the wind having swept off some of the light powdery flakes. I was proposing to get out of the cariole and walk for a while, when, tilting over one of these blocks, the vehicle gave a sudden lurch to one side, and upset in a moment, rolling us all three out in the snow. Nothing is thought less of than such an accident in Canada. The horse stood quite still, the driver and myself sprang to our feet, and were proceeding to right the cariole, when a sudden exclamation from the Canadian called my attention to my friend. He had not risen, but was lying just as he fell-on his face. We ran to raise him, when I saw, with a shudder, a stain on the snow, just at his head. It was not red, but a pale rose-colour. I had never seen it before, yet I knew at once that it was blood, frozen, as is almost any fluid in an instant in the winter of that climate. Of course we raised him at once. He had a contused wound in the right temple, but it had bled little, and was not bleeding now. However, an expression of countenance, and especially of eye, made me fear the worst. He did not answer when I spoke, and as we lifted him into the cariole, I fancied I perceived a slight shiver. Certainly after that all was still. His head had struck an angle of one of the projecting masses of stone, and this seemingly inadequate cause had dismissed the spirit; for as we hurried on as rapidly as possible to gain the nearest habitation, I felt his body stiffen at my side, and as the snow which had threatened began to fall, I saw that the unthawed flakes rested on a dead face. How I brought his body to Quebec, found out some there who knew him, told them the particulars, and saw him laid in the beautiful cemetery of Mount Jerome, I need not detail at length. I also wrote an account of the affair to some of his relatives in England, to most of whom I afterwards had an opportunity of relating the particulars in person. Poor fellow! Such was the end of his once promising life. I have never forgotten his story. Much in it remains unexplained, which I could only have cleared up to my satisfaction by such a cross-examination as I had not the heart to carry on after what I had heard. For instance, what was the true character of Marie? Was she virtuous until he met her? Was she really attached to him? How is her conduct with Captain V. to be explained? How did one so young, if not really pure, manage à long and successful course of hypocrisy? And why did she not appear against her former lover? This, indeed, might be accounted for. But then her flight, was that in consequence of the failure of her plan of revenge? What are we to think of the captain? Was he only a thoughtless and somewhat reckless young man, or a practised and accomplished libertine? Then the episcopal investigation appears more to resemble the proceedings under the French criminal code, according to which an accused person is considered guilty until he can prove his innocence, than anything to which Englishmen are accustomed. Perhaps most of these difficulties my unfortunate friend himself could not have solved; but his story has a moral. His case was indeed peculiar in many respects; but it is an example among many of the too-much-forgotten truth, that sin and sorrow, to be, as we are taught, united eternally in the next world, are not often separated even in this, although, probably, few have paid for a single error so heavy a penalty as years of misery and remorse, blighted hopes, affections, and prospects, exile, and self-inflicted shame and ruin, only averted by a sudden and violent death. MAMMON WORSHIP. THE reign of the false gods is never at an end. Each has his hour of supremacy by turn, as the vane of history may be set; but sometimes a republic of many together takes possession of the world, when it would be hard to say who is chief among them, and whose grip on the human heart is strongest. We, however, of this nineteenth century, have one supreme over the rest-one that we all worship with more or less fervency, and all bow down to, with pliant knees or supple, according to our degree; and the name of this favourite idol of ours is-Mammon. 66 66 99 66 Under all manner of softening guises do we worship mammon; as common-sense,' getting on in life," "good business powers," "the advantageous settlement of our children," "good luck," and, comprehensively, success." But we mean ever the same thing— the first of the three evils against which we pray to be delivered when we abjure the world, the flesh, and the devil,-Mammon, Ashloreth, and Beelzebub. No one is ashamed to be a mammon worshipper. Men hide other vices carefully enough, but the bust of gold walks about unveiled and is not abashed; on the contrary, it assumes to itself the title of the wisest faculty of humanity, without which virtue is a folly and piety a craze, and men are dreamers, good only for the cells of a lunatic asylum. And it is not only the confessedly irreligious who are thus mammon worshippers, but the professedly religious as well, those who have holy words nearest their lips, and who run off their reel of experiences with easiest facility. Yet the old man clothed in the new man's livery, but with heart uncleansed and hands unwashed, lives in a more dangerous state than even the worldling fluttering his shoulder-knot on the public parade, and swinging his censer in the face of day. The one may be awakened and struck with a burning sense of sin and spiritual dishonour; but the self-satisfied, the denier of the evil that is in him, the man blinded to his own fault, the awakening of his conscience, washed over as it is with the putrefaction of self-esteem, is of the miracles of grace! Terrible deceptions are these pious worldlings, these men and women of assenting intellectual faith but of practical mammon worship. Binding the broad phylacterics about their brows, but sacrificing to the idol in the court as they enter regular at church; and careful to observe more than the sabbath-day ordinances; glib in scriptural phrases and apt at biblical illustrations; thanking God that . they are not as other men, and counting it as an act of special mercy if they are kept from chance social contact with publican or sinner ;yet all the while careful exceedingly for the things of this world, greedy for money, absorbed in the pursuit of tangible success, measuring worth by wealth, and finding vice in rags and unbelief in homespun to be something very different to vice in velvet and atheism with the family diamonds on her brow,-what are they but whited sepulchres, fair to the outside, but within full of rottenness and dead men's bones? shams, deceptions, mockeries, and lies! We all know people such as these, who, understanding that the outward tendencies of English life are going towards strict observance, are pious of calculation, putting on the garb of religion over the badge of mammon, and believing that their true order is a secret from all men; fingering the little golden teraphim hung crosswise round their neck, while repeating the Creed and the Lord's Prayer with the rest. And a sad, untrustworthy, self-deceiving set they are! making the most fatal mistake of imagining that lazy faith without practical goodness is true spiritual life, and that to say, "Lord! Lord!" is to be in the right way of salvation, even where there is no endeavour to do the Lord's will. They are of the scum, sure to arise whenever piety is fashionable and to be religious is to be respectable. The most insidious of all idolatries is this mammon worship, the most widely spread and the most deeply rooted of any in our social life. Turn where we will we have examples of it, in all states and conditions, and with little hope, as it seems to me, of uprooting or reformation. The managing mother, who thinks health, temper, morals, and family repute of no account in her daughter's husband, compared with money and advantageous settlements, is a mammon worshipper of a very common type; the professional man of any denomination, whose heart is not in his work but in his pecuniary success, and whose aim is not to do well for the good of well doing, but for the praise and income resulting, is another kind well known to us all; the fashionable intriguer, clinging to the skirts of the upper ten thousand, ready to sell his soul for an opera-box in highsounding company-a man of the Pepys stamp,-is also common enough; so is the vulgar toady, who kow-tows to all above him, and wherever he can pick up sixpence or a dinner for his pains; so is the wretched groundling, clutching at the immediate guinea, no matter what the loss of solid standing and future consideration it involves, unable to rise to the grandeur of even his dirty craft; we know them all only too well, publicly labelled as they are, as mammon worshippers without mystery or disguise. Yet not only these, but all persons with whom the material issue is greater than the moral law, and the praise of men sweeter than the approbation of conscience-all who care more for success than for what is right, are of the same class and creed, let the outside differences be what they will. True in all things, the Bible has a specially deep and faithful word on this case, and thought for the future, which is one of the main motives of mammon worship; and the precept which, on the mere face of it, looks like an exhortation to utter recklessness, is of the divinest when examined to the core. "Take no thought for tomorrow" in your day's doings; plant your acorns straight and true, which is your work of to-day, and the "things of to-morrow will take care of themselves;" the grove of oaks will be straight and strong as the consequence. It is nowhere said, do your work ill; make your acorns into hasty pudding, and eat up the grove of centuries in a meal; plant them all awry, each hustling his neighbour, with no space for some and barren acres left unoccupied for others; dig them into the ground fathoms deep, so that the sun and rain can never penetrate to where they lie, or strew them carelessly upon the surface that the birds of the air may share them with the swine,-this is nowhere commanded; but care only to perfect your present doing, care only to complete and round off each present action, and the perfectness of that will bring the ripeness of the future along with it. The present is the real preparation for the future; not by direct endeavour and designed forecasting, but by doing to the best what lies before the hand. Carry that out into higher matters, and it will be found true to the last. In the spiritual life, the day's endeavour is the morrow's perfectness; the vice or passion of the moment conquered is the seedtime of future grace; and heaven is won, not at a bound, but by progressive labour, the well-lived present being always the noble root of a nobler future. In the material life, also, the gainful future rests always on the good work of the present; and were this but the rule in the political world, society would soon see the last of those fatal complications which come from the crooked planting of the diplomatic acorn, and from the insane habit of devouring the future to make a good meal for the present, as in budgets and commercial treaties sometimes. Looking round upon what we know, we find that a life devoted to gain without regard to means, and irrespective of material, generally fails in completeness of success, save, indeed, in certain walks which are muddy from end to end, and where both mud and money may be picked up to any extent desired. But to illustrate what I mean who would employ the lawyer or physician, notorious for his greed, and known as more likely to undertake you as a "good paying case " than from wish to do you service, or for even the glory of a striking professional success? The man to whom the pay, and not the cause, is his motive for partisanship, goes by an uglier name than I would care to set down here; and those making haste to be rich |