Oor ain folk times

234 THE SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS
never afterwards were my parents' circumstances so
straitened as they had been, before my good old
mother had laid her case in simple faith before ' a
prayer-hearing and a prayer-answering God.'
Let the cynic sneer as he may. I am honestly
thankful to say that I have no difficulty in accepting
my dear old mother's version, and sharing in her
belief.
Dear simple earnest soul ! How imperfectly we
valued that noble, confiding trust, that genuine, un-
affected piety, till the sweet, loving, gentle mother had
left us. But ah ! now, after the lapse of years, when
we haA^e been through the toil and turmoil, the smoke
and dust of life's weary battle, we would give much to
have the same calm assured trust that she had.
Sometimes, it must be confessed, the dear old lady's
exhortations excited the wicked youngsters to unseemly
exhibitions of levity. I am told by my brother George,
now a minister in New Zealand, that on one occasion,
long after I had left the paternal roof, the class in the
Sunday School to which my younger brothers were
attached, and which was taught by my mother, had
been particularly restless and ill -behaved. She had
been making an earnest appeal to the boys to concern
themselves more earnestly and diligently about the
things of religion. In her fervour, becoming quite
oblivious of the mood the boys were manifesting openly,
she wound up by passionately exclaiming : ' Eh, boys !
I wad do anything to save yer souls.' My younger
brother Henry, commonly called ' Hen,' — a wicked
young wag in his way, but mother's pet — looked up
with a comical twinkle in his eye, but with an assump-