“I ain’t much of a hand at reading writing-hand,” said Betty Higden, “though I can read my Bible and most print.” Little Nell was in the constant habit of taking the Bible with her to read while in her quiet and lonely retreat in the old church, after all her long and weary wanderings were past. In the happy time which Oliver Twist spent with Mrs. Maylie and Rose, he used to read, in the evenings, a chapter or two from the Bible, which he had been studying all the week, and in the performance of which duty he felt more proud and pleased than if he had been the clergyman himself. There was Sarah, in the “Sketches by Boz,” who regularly read the Bible to her old mistress; and in the touching sketch of “Our Next-door Neighbour” in the same book, we find the mother of the sick boy engaged in reading the Bible to him when the visitor called and interrupted her. This incident reminds us of the poor Chancery prisoner in the Fleet, who, when on his death-bed calmly waiting the release which would set him free for ever, had the Bible read to him by an old man in a cobbler’s apron. One of David Copperfield’s earliest recollections was of a certain Sunday evening, when his mother read aloud to him and Peggotty the story of Our Saviour raising Lazarus from the dead. So deep an impression did the story make upon the boy, taken in connexion with all that had been lately told him about his father’s funeral, that he requested to be carried up to his bed-room, from the windows of which he could see the quiet churchyard with the dead all lying in their graves at rest below the solemn moon. Pip, too, in “Great Expectations,” was not only in the habit of reading the Bible to the convict under sentence of death, but of praying with him as well; and Esther Summerson tells us how she used to come downstairs every evening at nine o’clock to read the Bible to her god-mother. Not a few of the dwellings into which Mr. Dickens conducts us in the course of some of his best-known stories, have their walls decorated with prints illustrative of familiar scenes from sacred history. Thus when Martin Chuzzlewit went away from Pecksniff’s, and was ten good miles on his way to London, he stopped to breakfast in the parlour of a little roadside inn, on the walls of which were two or three highly-coloured pictures, representing the Wise Men at the Manger, and the Prodigal Son returning to his Father. On the walls of Peggotty’s charming boat-cottage there were prints, showing the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Casting of Daniel into the Den of Lions. When Arthur Clennam came home after his long absence in the East, he found the Plagues of Egypt still hanging, framed and glazed, on the same old place in his mother’s parlour. And who has forgotten the fireplace in old Scrooge’s house, which “was paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures?”