stranger into a private room. "I fear from your looks," said the father,
"that you have bad-tidings to tell me of my young stranger; perhaps God
will resume the blessing he has bestowed ere he attains the age of
manhood, or perhaps he is destined to be unworthy of the affection which
we are naturally disposed to devote to our offspring." "Neither the one
nor the other," answered the stranger, "unless my judgment greatly ere,
the infant will survive the years of minority, and in temper and
disposition will prove all that his parents can wish. But with much in
his horoscope which promises many blessings, there is one evil influence
strongly predominant, which threatens to subject him to an unhallowed
and unhappy temptation about the time when he shall attain the age of
twenty-one, which period, the constellations intimate, will be the
crisis of his fate. In what shape, or with what peculiar urgency, this
temptation may beset him, my art cannot discover." "Your knowledge,
then, can afford us no defence," said the anxious father, "against the
threatened evil?" "Pardon me," answered the stranger, "it can. The
influence of the constellations is powerful; but He who made the heavens
is more powerful than all, if his aid be invoked in sincerity and truth.
You ought to dedicate this boy to the immediate service of his Maker,
with as much sincerity as Samuel was devoted to the worship in the
Temple by his parents. You must regard him as a being separated from the
rest of the world. In childhood, in boyhood, you must surround him with
the pious and virtuous, and protect him to the utmost of your power from
the sight or hearing of any crime, in word or action. He must be
educated in religious and moral principles of the strictest description.
Let him not enter the world, lest he learn to partake of its follies, or
perhaps of its vices. In short, preserve him as far as possible from all
sin, save that of which too great a portion belongs to all the fallen
race of Adam. With the approach of his twenty-first birth-day comes the
crisis of his fate. If he survive it, he will be happy and prosperous on