Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/93

1866.]  were wholly with the latter; and for these she was eternally killing fatted calves, in spite of angry elder brothers and the whole sect of whited sepulchres, who forgive exactly four hundred and ninety times by the multiplication-table, and compass sea and land to make one hypocrite. If she had had a fold of her own, all her sheep would have been black.

One day in January, 1849, I called to see Aunt Judy for the last time. Superannuated, and rapidly failing, she had been installed by my father in a comfortable room in the house of a sort of cousin of hers, a worthy and "well-to-do" woman of color, where she might be cheered by the visits of the more respectable people of her own class,—darkies of substantial character and of the first families, among whom she was esteemed as a mother in Israel. Thither either my father or one or two of his children came every day, to watch her declining health, to administer to her comfort, and to wait upon her with those offices of respect to which she had earned her right by three quarters of a century of humble, patient love and faithful service. My chest was packed, and on the morrow I must sail for the ends of the earth; but she knew nothing of that. All that afternoon we talked together as we had never talked before; and many an injury that my indignant tears had kept fresh and sticky was "dried" in the warmth of her earnest, anxious peace-making, and "rubbed out" then and there. No page of my inditing could be pure enough to record it all; but is it not written in the Book of Life, among the regrets and the forgivenesses, the confessions and the consolations and the hopes?

The last word I ever uttered to Aunt Judy was a careful, loving, pious lie. She said, "Won't you come ag'in to-morrow, son, and see de poor ole woman?" And I replied, "O yes, Auntie!"—though I well knew that, even as I spoke, I was looking into the wise truth of those patient, tender eyes for the last time in this world. The sun was going down as we parted,—that sun has never risen again for me.

In June, 1850, on board a steamboat in the Sacramento River, I received the very Bible I had first learned to read in, sitting on her lap by the kitchen fire,—in the beginning was the Word. She was dead; and, dying, she had sent it me, with her blessing,—at the end was the Word.

In August, 1852, that Bible was tossed ashore from a wreck in an Indian river, and by angels delivered at a mission school in the jungle, where other heathens beside myself have doubtless learned from it the Word that was, and is, and ever shall be. On the inside of the cover, sitting on her lap by the kitchen fire, I had written, with appropriate "pot-hooks and hangers,"

Such her quiet consummation and renown!

NE of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical religion"; and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters. But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there