Kneeling down by his bedside, and holding his hand in both of mine, I commenced. He let me say the two or three first invocations of the "Our Father," but when I said, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us," he suddenly pressed my hand, and as one arousing from a long sleep he exclaimed, "Oh! I remember that. Yes! I think when I was a little boy my mother taught me something like that. Will you please commence it again?" I recommenced it and then instantaneously, from the depths of his soul, across his darkened mind, and from far away in his early childhood--across seventy-four years--across all those wars and all those battle-fields which had passed over his life and effaced from his soul all ideas of religion, came back to this old soldier the remembrance of his mother, and the prayers she had taught him when a little boy, and he commenced unaided to recall the words. One by one I saw them leave his soul, as if they had all been engulfed, and were now rising to the surface. At each sentence he interrupted himself: "Oh!" he exclaimed, "I remember--'Our Father who art in heaven'--yes, indeed, that is it--'Hallowed be Thy name'--that is it again!--I remember it all now!--'Thy Kingdom come.'--Yes, yes, I remember I used to say all that--oh! isn't that prayer beautiful!" And when he came to the words "Forgive us our trespasses,"--"Ah," he cried, "above all the rest, I remember that--those are the words that brought all the rest back to me; my mother used to make me say that whenever I did anything wrong." And in this manner he finished the "Our Father;" then he asked to say it with me, and seemed never weary in repeating it over and over. "But," he exclaimed, "is there not another? Oh! yes, now I remember, my mother said there was a Blessed Virgin--stop--I must find that prayer also! But it won't come back. Say it to me so that I can remember, all about it." And when I repeated the first words, he interrupted me with a joyful cry, "Oh! yes, that is it, 'Hail Mary!'" And then, without waiting for me to take the lead, he continued, "full of grace, the Lord is with thee," and all the words seemed to flow miraculously from his soul, and with tears flowing down his cheeks, he repeated, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us poor sinners, now and the hour of our death." Behold in this old man the power of the prayers which a pious mother had taught him in his childhood! Precious germs deposited in his soul, and a long time deposited there--but, thank God, they were there--and at the supreme moment, under a favorable ray of Divine grace, they burst forth to support him in his last hours, and to open for him the gates of a happy eternity! He never wearied in saying them, but continued constantly repeating them.