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22

THE WEDDING WITHOUT A SMILE.

Marshall, on leaving the bar-room, set out with the purpose of passing the parsonage—peradventure of pausing for a moment to gaze at the window of Emily's apartment. As he drew near, it happened that a figure, clothed in white, stood in the door. There was no moon, and the light of the stars was obscured by clouds; still, the outlines of the form were visible, and earth contained but one such form. It would not do to pass without stopping to do it reverence. The interview at the door, varied by occasional visits of Emily to her father's room to see that he slept, continued until midnight.

Marshall now spent a large portion of his time at the parsonage. "My son," said Mr. Wilson, one day, "it did not occur to me, amid my thankfulness and joy, that I could leave my daughter with one in whom my confidence is so entire, that your father should be consulted in the matter."

"I have not failed to do so," said Marshall, taking from his pocket and reading the following brief and characteristic letter:

"MY DEAR GEORGE: Yours received-I have not time to consider all the points presented, but as you cannot do a foolish thing, you have my full consent to do as you please.

Your affectionate father,

S. MARSHALL."

"I am glad to know that you did not forget your filial duty. Great blessings are connected with its performance. Now that you have your father's consent I am satisfied. I suffered greatly from anxiety in regard to Emily till the night before you came. I was then enabled to cast my burden upon the Lord. And mark, how He orders things! As soon as I rested upon him by faith, the provision was made apparent to sense. Now I can wait with patience till my change come."

A day or two after the interview above described, Bolton came to see his young friend. "It may be," said he, with characteristic bluntness, "you will think I am meddling with that which is none of my business, but I can't help it if you do. I must do what I think is my duty. I

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"It may not be agreeable to Miss Wilson."

It must be agreeable to her father, for he was always a man of sense, and I do not see how it can well be otherwise than agreeable to her. I would speak to the minister about it if I were you."

"I will commission you to do so."

"I don't know about it-it will be rather awkward work-but I will do it, because it ought to be done."

Bolton went immediately to the parsonage, and in a manner more delicate than could well be expected of him, proposed the matter. As he had anticipated, it was in accordance with the dying father's earnest wishes.

At their next meeting it was evident to Marshall that the matter had been spoken of to Emily. She made some maidenly objections, but yielded to representations of the satisfaction it would give her father to see her under the legal protection of one whom he loved with his whole heart.

The deacons of the church, and a few friends, Bolton among the rest, assembled in the chamber of sickness, soon to be the chamber of death, and the young minister whose name had been falsely connected with Emily, performed the ceremony which rendered the lovers one. Smiles rested not upon the countenances of those present, yet joy was in their hearts.

Mr. Wilson's last earthly wish was now gratified, and he was ready to depart. On the fourth day after the marriage he breathed his last. The smile upon his lips, as he gave the last look to his children, who were bending over him, remained when death had set his seal. All hearts rejoiced that Emily had so noble a supporter as she followed her father to the tomb.

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THE PAST SHALL REAPPEAR;

OR, THE BALIZE PILOT.

BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.

We shape ourselves the joy or fear,

Of which life to come is made;
We fill our future's atmosphere
With sunshine, or with shade.

The tissue of the life to be

We weave with colors all OUR OWN;
And in the field of destiny

We REAP AS WE HAVE SOWN.-J. G. WHITTIER.

THERE came to the knowledge of the writer a striking verification of this great truth, when he was anchored in a merchant-ship on the bar at the Southwest Pass of the mighty Mississippi. As illustrative of the power of conscience, and shedding a warning light upon the character and history and mental exercises of a bad man, it is well worthy of record.

We were seventy days from Marseilles, with a cargo of claret wine for New Orleans, and had taken a Balize pilot in one of those dense fogs that hang over the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the great father of waters, in the months of March and April. When the tow-boat Hudson fastened alongside of us for the purpose of lightening our ship by a transfer of cargo, in order to draw us over the bar, this pilot obtained access to the whiskey-barrel, which, we are sorry to say, open for the unrestrained use of the hands, on many of the boats of our western waters. Having been some days in our ship without his customary draughts of the maddening fire-water, he drank, it is likely, more deep than he was wont to do; and while trying that same evening to walk down a ladder laid obliquely from the hurricane-deck of the steamboat, he lost his balance and fell heavily against the capstan and down to the engine-deck, cutting the back of his head, and badly bruising his side, unobserved by the men, who were all busy on the cargo. With difficulty and groaning he made his way back into the ship and down into the cabin, where was the writer and a beloved brother-now in glory.

After assistance given him in bathing his wounds, and helping him into his berth, he began freely to unbosom, without questioning, his ago

nized soul. The imminent danger which he had run of being killed or drowned, had greatly alarmed him; and when we pressed him to the consideration of what would have been his condition, had he been thus unexpectedly summoned into eternity, and whether he was prepared to meet God, conscience began to unrake its buried fires, and blow them into flame, as it plied him with the harrowing recollection of his past offenses. And there he rolled and writhed upon his bed, under the double agony of remorse and bodily pain, an object pitiable and sad indeed.

He thought to give himself some relief by telling us, in the way of soliloquy with himself, some of his past crimes-by which, it appeared, that at the early age of seventeen he was stained with the blood of murder. He had gained the affections of a young girl of sixteen, who was loved by another young man of his companions, and had seduced her. His rival challenged him ; they met alone with pistols, a duel was fought, and the former was shot through the body a little below the heart. He ran to his antagonist as he fell; received, he said, his forgiveness, and was told with his dying breath immediately to make his escape from Virginia. He did so and became a sailor, afterwards a privateersman in the wars of the States of South America, in which capacity he committed many acts of wickedness and robbery, that seemed to come up before his mind with great vividness and horror. He was taken in an engagement, along with others, imprisoned, and condemned to be hung, but succeeded, with his companions, in breaking out, killing five or six of the guards, and making his escape. Since then he had led, for a while, a

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THE PAST SHALL REAPPEAR.

roving, lawless life, until he had finally settled down as a pilot at the Balize, with a band of half-reclaimed freebooters like himself, among whom he had seen a murder perpetrated with a carving-knife at the dinner-table, in a fit of inflamed passion.

When we urged upon him the necessity of repentance and faith in Christ, for the forgiveness of his great sins, he would endeavor with himself to excuse and palliate his guilt, talk of the infinite mercy of God, and ask if it were possible that all those who had died not Christians, in battle and by accident, would be forever lost. When assured, on the undeniable word of God, that as a man was in heart when he died, so would he be through eternity, and that if he did not love God here, neither would he in the next world, then he would attempt to soothe himself by the consideration of the multitudes that were like him. But all could not suffice to relieve the gnawings of the undying worm at his heart, or to quench the quenchless fire of his re

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When excusing himself for the duel, saying that he was challenged and did not want to fight, and that he expostulated with his rival in vain, but had to fight, we suggested that he ought to have fled away, or suffered anything rather than stand up to be shot at or shoot another. Ah, yes!" said he, with a self-condemning tone and emphasis I shall never forget, 'Young man, you are right—you are right!' The workings of the soul we saw under sin, and we thought this might be a faint image of the power of conscience and the anguish of the finally impenitent in hell. When he closed his eyes in slumber, he said the image of his murdered companion stood before his mind, and he could see his pallid cheek and languishing eye, and hear his expiring words. And again his words were that he saw the countenance of his friend, with its sad, dying look, as clearly when he closed his eyes as he could with them open. It haunted him always; a fact fearfully corroborative of the remark of Dr. Macnish in "The Philosophy of Sleep," who says: "When any crime has been committed by one, the wide storehouse of retributive vengeance is opened up in sleep, and its appalling horrors poured upon him. In vain does he endeavor to expel the dreadful remembrance of his deeds, and bury them in forgetfulness; from the abyss of slumber they start forth as the vampyres start from their sepulchres, and hover around him like avenging furies, while the voice of conscience stuns his ears with murmurs of judgment and eternity, like an echo from the tomb. Then a crowd of doleful remembrances

rush into the mind, no longer to be debarred from visiting the depths of his spirit."

From the first of this pilot's coming on board, we thought he had the restless air and manner and suspicious ways of a man whose conscience was accusing him of crime. Now in his agitated mood he thought aloud, and sometimes a couplet of a hymn or a scrap of Scripture which he had committed in childhood, but had not thought of before, perhaps, for the space of thirty years, would come back to his mind, reappearing from the depths of the past and rising to the surface, as do the timbers, sometimes, of long-foundered ships. In this way he repeated parts of those hymns, "The Dying Christian," "Before Jehovah's Awful Throne," "In robes of Judgment, lo, He comes," and several others, proving forcibly the importance of causing children to learn early, by heart, and infix upon the memory, hymns and verses of the Bible.

If such, we thought, be the power of an awakened conscience in this life, burdened with crime and writhing with a sense of guilt, how terrible will remorse be in eternity, when its fires shall be kindled by keen perceptions of truth and obligation, and by a quickened recollective memory, from whose unfading tablets no sin shall be erased; no lost opportunity of repentance and submission to Christ obliterated; no entreaty of friends or warnings of ministers, or striving of the Spirit effaced; but there they shall burn on forever in characters of fire, consuming the imperishable spirit with anguish unutterable. There will be no need that there should be written on paper those significant words once indited by a dying man, "remorse, remorse, remorse," but it will be engraved as with the point of a diamond and a pen of steel on the pages of conscience, in characters that must be perused forever by all the finally impenitent.

Who that has ever thus seen, in this life, a guilty man writhing under the tortures of remorse, has not thought of the undying worm and the quenchless fire of hell? What material image can be adduced, that conveys such a vivid idea of torment and despair, as the bare thought that the sufferer in the world of woe must be always saying to himself, "I am the author of my own punishment-I am self-ruined. With suicidal hand I have slain myself." Thy ways and thy doings have procured these things unto thee; this thy wickedness is bitter. Your iniquities have turned away those things, and your sins have withholden good things from thee.

Then shall the soul around it call
Impressions that it gathered here;
And pictured on the eternal wall
THE PAST SHALL REAPPEAR.

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