Solitude and silence, and bitter thought are great tamers of the human heart. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," says the Apostle, and John Ayliffe was now forced to put in the sickle. Death was before his eyes, looming large and dark and terrible, like the rock of adamant in the fairy tale, against which the bark of the adventurous mariner was sure to be dashed. Death for the first time presented itself to his mind in all its grim reality. Previously it had seemed with him a thing hardly worth considering--inevitable--appointed to all men--to every thing that lives and breathes--no more to man than to the sheep, or the ox, or any other of the beasts that perish. He had contemplated it merely as death--as the extinction of being--as the goal of a career--as the end of a chase where one might lie down and rest, and forget the labor and the clamor and the trouble of the course. He had never in thought looked beyond the boundary--he had hardly asked himself if there was aught beyond. He had satisfied himself by saying, as so many men do, "Every man must die some time or another," and had never asked his own heart, "What is it to die?" But now death presented itself under a new aspect; cold and stern, relentless and mysterious, saying in a low solemn tone, "I am the guide. Follow me there. Whither I lead thou knowest not, nor seest what shall befall thee. The earth-worm and the mole fret but the earthly garment of the man; the flesh, and the bones, and the beauty go down to dust, and ashes, and corruption. The man comes with me to a land undeclared--to a presence infinitely awful--to judgment and to fate; for on this side of the dark portal through which I am the guide, there is no such thing as fate. It lies beyond the grave, and thither thou must come without delay." He had heard of immortality, but he had never thought of it. He had been told of another world, but he had never rightly believed in it. The thought of a just judge, and of an eternal doom, had been presented to him in many shapes, but he had never received it; and he had lived and acted, and thought and felt, as if there were neither eternity, nor judgment, nor punishment. But in that dread hour the deep-rooted, inexplicable conviction of a God and immortality, implanted in the hearts of all men, and only crushed down in the breasts of any by the dust of vanity and the lumber of the world, rose up and bore its fruits according to the soil. They were all bitter. If there were another life, a judgment, an eternity of weal or woe, what was to be his fate? How should he meet the terrors of the judgment-seat--he who had never prayed from boyhood--he who through life had never sought God--he who had done in every act something that conscience reproved, and that religion forbade?