He lives to hear more! Mr Hylton has not suffered twenty years to elapse without appealing to the proud and uncrucified heart of the great Earl, who seemed to have forgotten, in the midst of his transitory splendour, that the great God of heaven himself became a humble man, the eternal pattern of humility _to_ man on earth. The faithful minister knocked at the soul of the arrogant and overbearing lord, until he shook its hardness, and made it meet for heaven and its blessings. When he brought tidings of the murderer’s confession, he came to one who had heard from the same lips often before happier tidings, and promises bright with celestial splendour. In former days Mr Hylton had approached the Lord of Milverstoke as a meek martyr would have dared the violence of a savage beast; now he comes with his intelligence to one rendered, at the close of his long life, docile as a lamb. He speaks, and the Earl asks tremulously, and with many sighs, whether his reverend monitor tells him of the murderer’s death in judgment or in mercy. “‘In mercy, dear my Lord! in mercy!’ answered Mr Hylton, with a brightening countenance and a cheerful voice: ‘in you, spared to advanced age, I see before me only a monument of mercy and goodness! Had you continued till now, deaf to the teaching of His Holy Spirit—dead to His gracious influences—hateful, relentless, and vindictive—this which has now occurred would, to my poor thinking, have appeared to speak only in judgment, uttering condemnation in your ears, and sealing your eyes in judicial blindness! But you have been enabled to hear a still small voice, whose melting accents have pierced through your deaf ear, and broken a heart once obdurate in pride and hopelessly unforgiving. Plainly I speak, dear my Lord, for my mission I feel to be now no longer one of terror, but of consolation! It is awful, but awful in mercy only, and condescension!’” The Earl is old; but there lives another still older, who must be visited without delay. The Saxon patriarch, who, when we first saw him, a man “of simple and stern character” clung to his Bible as to the rock upon which the poor of this world, the sorely beset and the heavily tried, can alone repose in peace, and who referred simply, believingly, and lovingly to that sacred volume, as the cup of sorrow grew fuller and fuller, until at length it overflowed and could hold no more,—this aged man, Ayliffe the grandfather, still lives and owns the cottage which he never would give up. What is the Earl of Milverstoke to do, but to ask pardon from the gray hairs of the man whom the law so much offended, and he still more, by the cruel harshness of his once impenitent spirit? See how he totters to the unpolluted gate!