Gospel truths impressed upon them from her earnest lips. Be you very
sure that where this great duty of all duties is left unfulfilled by a
mother, a child is not brought up as it ought to be. Win your child
towards heaven in his early years, and he will not forget it when he is
old.

It will be as a very shield, compassing him about through life. He may
wander astray--there is no telling--in the heyday of his hot-blooded
youth, for the world's temptations are as a running fire, scorching all
that venture into its heat; but the good foundation has been laid, and
the earnest, incessant prayers have gone up, and he will find his way
home again.

Mrs. Channing closed the Bible, and spoke, as usual. It was all that
teaching should be. Good lessons as to this world; loving pictures of
that to come. She had contrived to impress them, not with the too
popular notion that heaven was a far-off place up in the skies some
vague, millions of miles away, and to which we might be millions of
years off; but that it was very near to them: that God was ever present
with them; and that Death, when he came, should be looked upon as a
friend, not an enemy. Hamish was three and twenty years old now, and he
loved those minutes of instruction as he had done when a child. They
had borne their fruit for him, and for all: though not, perhaps, in an
equal degree.

The reading over, and the conversation over, she gave the book to
Constance to put away, and the boys rose, and prepared to enter upon
their several occupations. It was not the beginning of the day for Tom
and Charles, for they had been already to early school.