speak._ I proposed to intrust my penitence to one, who, in becoming the child of God, had atoned for _my_ offence in making him the child of sin. In imagination I knelt already at your confessional,--heard you, by the authority of the church, and the commission of Heaven, pronounce me forgiven. I saw you stand beside my dying bed,--I felt you press the cross to my cold lips, and point to that heaven where I hoped my vow had already secured a seat for you. Before your birth I had laboured to lift you to heaven, and my recompence is, that your obstinacy threatens to drag us both into the gulph of perdition. Oh! my child, if our prayers and intercessions are available to the delivery of the souls of our departed relatives from punishment, hear the adjuration of a living parent, who implores you not to seal her everlasting condemnation!” I was unable to answer, my mother saw it, and redoubled her efforts. “My son, if I thought that my kneeling at your feet would soften your obduracy, I would prostrate myself before them this moment.” “Oh! madam, the sight of such unnatural humiliation ought to kill me.” “And yet you will not yield--the agony of this confession, the interests of my salvation and your own, nay, the preservation of my life, are of no weight with you.” She perceived that these words made me tremble, and repeated, “Yes, my life; beyond the day that your inflexibility exposes me to infamy, I will not live. If you have resolution, I have resolution too; nor do I dread the result, for God will charge on your soul, not on mine, the crime an unnatural child has forced me to--and yet you will not yield.--Well, then, the prostration of my body is nothing to that prostration of soul you have already driven me to. I kneel to my own child for life and for salvation,” and she knelt to me. I attempted to raise her; she repelled me, and exclaimed, in a voice hoarse with despair, “And you will not yield?” “I do not say so.” “And what, then, do you say?--raise me not, approach me not, till you answer me.” “That I will think.” “Think! you must decide.” “I do, then, I do.” “But how?” “To be whatever you would have me.” As I uttered these words, my mother fell in a swoon at my feet. As I attempted to lift her up, scarce knowing if it was not a corse I held in my arms, I felt I never could have forgiven myself if she had been reduced to that situation by my refusing to comply with her last request. * * * * *