Mrs. Channing sat with her children. Breakfast was over, and she had the Bible open before her. Never, since their earliest years of understanding, had she failed to assemble them together for a few minutes’ reading, morning and evening. Not for too long at once; she knew the value of _not tiring_ young children, when she was leading them to feel an interest in sacred things. She would take Hamish, a little fellow of three years old, upon her knee, read to him a short Bible story, suited to his age, and then talk to him. Talk to him in a soft, loving, gentle tone, of God, of Jesus, of heaven; of his duties in this world; of what he must do to attain to everlasting peace in the next. Day by day, step by step, untiringly, unceasingly, had she thus laboured, to awaken good in the child’s heart, to train it to holiness, to fill it with love of God. As the other children came on in years, she, in like manner, took them. From simple Bible stories to more advanced Bible stories, and thence to the Bible itself; with other books at times and seasons: a little reading, a little conversation, Gospel truths impressed upon them from her earnest lips. Be you very sure that where this great duty of all duties is left unfulfilled by a mother, a child is not brought up as it ought to be. Win your child towards heaven in his early years, and he will not forget it when he is old. It will be as a very shield, compassing him about through life. He may wander astray--there is no telling--in the heyday of his hot-blooded youth, for the world’s temptations are as a running fire, scorching all that venture into its heat; but the good foundation has been laid, and the earnest, incessant prayers have gone up, and he will find his way home again. Mrs. Channing closed the Bible, and spoke, as usual. It was all that teaching should be. Good lessons as to this world; loving pictures of that to come. She had contrived to impress them, not with the too popular notion that heaven was a far-off place up in the skies some vague, millions of miles away, and to which we might be millions of years off; but that it was very near to them: that God was ever present with them; and that Death, when he came, should be looked upon as a friend, not an enemy. Hamish was three and twenty years old now, and he loved those minutes of instruction as he had done when a child. They had borne their fruit for him, and for all: though not, perhaps, in an equal degree. The reading over, and the conversation over, she gave the book to Constance to put away, and the boys rose, and prepared to enter upon their several occupations. It was not the beginning of the day for Tom and Charles, for they had been already to early school. “Is papa so very much worse to-day, mamma?” asked Tom. “I did not say he was worse, Tom,” replied Mrs. Channing. “I said he had passed a restless night, and felt tired and weak.” “Thinking over that confounded lawsuit,” cried hot, thoughtless Tom.