It was a huge branching thing like our old family tree. But at the root of the tree, where would be the name of Adam or Noah, or Æneas of Troy, or Cassibelaun, or whoever else was recognized as the head of the family, stood the sacred name of the Holy Trinity. From this trunk forked off two leading branches, one representing the wicked and the other the just, with the words written along them to show that the very same mercies and means of grace which produce repentance and faith and love in the hearts of the just, produce bitterness and false security and hatred of God in the hearts of the wicked. Further and further the branches diverged until one ended in an angel with wings, and the other in a mouth of a horrible hobgoblin with a whale's mouth, a dragon's claws, and a lion's teeth, and both were united by the lines,-- "Whether to heaven or hell you bend, God will have glory in the end."* * A similar tree is to be seen in the beginning of Bunyan'a Pilgrim's Progress, in the edition of 1698. Most terrible was this delineation to me, sitting that sunny autumn day in the apple-tree, especially because if you were once on the wrong branch, it was not at all pointed out how you were ever to get on the right. All seemed as irrevocable and inevitable as that point in our own pedigree where Edwy, the eldest son, became a Benedictine monk and vanished into a thin flourish, and Walter, the second son, married Adalgiva, heiress of Netherby Manor, and branched off into us. And it looked so terribly (with unutterable terror I felt it) as if it mattered as little to the Holy Trinity what became of any one of us, as to Cassibelaun or Noah what became of his descendants, Edwy or Walter. So it happened that Roger and I sat very awe-stricken and still in our perch in the apple-tree, while the wind fluttered the green leaves around us, and the sunbeams ripened the rosy apples for their work, and then danced in and out on the grass below for their play. And I remember as if it were yesterday how the thought shuddered through my heart, that the same sun which was shining on Roger and me, on that last 30th of June, making hay in the orchard, was at that very same moment scorching those poor wounded gentlemen in the pillory in the Palace Yard, and not losing a whit of its glory to us by all the anguish it was inflicting, like a blazing furnace, on them. And if this fearful tree were true, did it not seem as if it were the same with God? I sat some time silent under the weight of this dread. It made me shiver with cold in the sunshine, and at length I could keep it in no longer, and said to Roger, in a whisper, for I was half afraid to hear my own words,-- "Oh, Roger, why did not God kill the devil?"