pride, refused to obey.

Fifty years afterward Johnson became the celebrated author, the compiler of
the English Dictionary, and one of the most distinguished scholars in
England; but he never forgot his act of unkindness to his poor,
hard-toiling father. So when he visited Ottoxeter, he determined to show
his sorrow and repentance. He went into the market-place at the time of
business, uncovered his head, and stood there for an hour in the pouring
rain, on the very spot where the bookstall used to stand. "This," he says,
"was an act of contrition for my disobedience to my kind father."

The spectacle of the great Dr. Johnson standing bareheaded in the storm to
atone for the wrong done by him fifty years before, is a grand and touching
one. There is a representation of it in marble on the doctor's monument.

Many a man in after-life has felt something harder and heavier than a storm
of rain beating upon his heart when he remembered his acts of unkindness to
a good father or mother now in the grave.

Dr. John Todd, of Pittsfield, the eminent writer, never forgot how, when
his old father was very sick, and sent him away for medicine, he, a little
lad, been unwilling to go, and made up a lie, saying that the druggist had
no such medicine.

The old man was dying when little Johnny came in, but he said to Johnny,
"My boy, your father suffers great pain for want of that medicine."

Johnny started, in great distress, for the medicine, but it was too late.
On his return the father was almost gone. He could only say to the weeping
boy, "Love God, and always speak the truth; for the eye of God is always