Abbey. His fancy loved to people his native Scotland with the knights and ladies of olden times, and his fondest dream was to make himself the head of a house in the old feudal style. He lavished care and money upon his estate. The cottage grew to a mansion, the mansion to a castle, land was bought and forests planted, and year after year more was spent than was earned.

Then came a financial crisis and the failure of a publishing house with which Scott was connected, with obligations of nearly six hundred thousand dollars. Scott was not bound in any legal sense to pay this money, but he knew that as a man of honor it was his debt. He refused all offers of composition, and only asked time, time to earn the money by the labor of his brain. It was an herculean task. The freshness of youth was gone, his health was not good, and his frail wife was even then sinking in the illness of death.

But Sir Walter was a man of iron nerve and of a pride and courage rarely equaled. And so he set to work. "I experience a sort of determined pleasure," he said, "in confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse, in standing, as it were, in the breach that has overthrown my fortune, and saying, Here I stand, at least an honest man.""

Two days after the failure, he resumed work on "Woodstock," the novel he was then writing. To Lady Davy he wrote truly enough, "I beg my humblest compliments to Sir Humphry, and tell him Ill Luck, that direful chemist, never put into his crucible a more indissoluble piece of stuff than your affectionate cousin and sincere well wisher, Walter Scott."

Without one word of weak regret or vain repining, he left his splendid home at Abbotsford and shut himself up with his work in humble lodgings at Edinburgh. Book after book came from his pen to delight eager readers. Despite the strain of overwork and illness, he held to his task, often dictating between paroxysms of the severest pain.

He succeeded in his self-imposed task. His romances paid the enormous debt which he had assumed. But just as he stood on the threshold of success and renewed prosperity, his constitution gave way. A stroke of paralysis was followed by such brain failure that he was compelled to give up work and visit Malta in a vain search for health.

The next summer he came home to die. He was unconscious during the first stages of the journey. But as the carriage approached his home, he began to look about him. Presently he murmured a name or two, "Gala water, surely, Buckholm, Torwoodlee," and his dim eye brightened as it rested on the familiar scenes. When the towers of Abbotsford came in sight he sprang up with a cry of delight and had to be held in the carriage.

He lingered for two months with only one clear interval of consciousness. On that day he sent for his son-in-law and said to him, "Lockhart, I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man, -be virtuous, be religious, — be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here."

A few days later he died, and was laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey.

REBECCA'S HYMN

FROM "IVANHOE," BY SIR WALTER SCOTT

This hymn is sung by Rebecca, the Jewess, when a captive.

When Israel, of the Lord beloved,

Out of the land of bondage came,
Her fathers' God before her moved,
An awful guide, in smoke and flame.
By day, along the astonished lands
The cloudy pillar glided slow;
By night, Arabia's crimsoned sands
Returned the fiery column's glow.

There rose the choral hymn of praise,
And trump and timbrel answered keen,
And Zion's daughters poured their lays,
With priest's and warrior's voice between.
No portents now our foes amaze,

Forsaken Israel wanders lone :

Our fathers would not know Thy ways,
And Thou hast left them to their own.

But, present still, though now unseen,
When brightly shines the prosperous day,
Be thoughts of Thee a cloudy screen

To temper the deceitful ray.

And oh, when stoops on Judah's path
In shade and storm the frequent night,
Be Thou, long-suffering, slow to wrath,
A burning and a shining light!

Our harps we left by Babel's streams,
The tyrant's jest, the Gentile's scorn ;
No censer round our altar beams,

And mute are timbrel, trump, and horn.
But Thou hast said, "The blood of goat,
The flesh of rams, I will not prize;
A contrite heart, an humble thought,
Are mine accepted sacrifice."

DOUBTING CASTLE

BY JOHN BUNYAN

Bunyan was an English writer. He was born in 1628 and died in 1688. Read his famous book, "Pilgrim's Progress," from which this selection is taken. It describes the heavenward journey of Christian and the sorrows and temptations of the way. The book was written while Bunyan was a prisoner in jail on account of his religious belief.

At last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there until the day brake; but being weary they fell asleep. Now there was, not far from the place where they lay, a castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair; and it was in his grounds they were now sleeping.

Wherefore he, getting up in the morning early and walking up and down in his fields, caught Christian and Hopeful asleep in his grounds. Then, with a grim and surly voice, he bid them awake; and asked them whence they were, and what they did on his grounds. They told him they were pilgrims, and that they had lost

Then said the giant,

"You have this night

their way. trespassed on me, by trampling in and lying on my grounds, and therefore you must go along with me."

two men.

So they were forced to go, because he was stronger than they. They also had but little to say, for they knew themselves in a fault. The giant, therefore, drove them before him, and put them into his castle, into a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirits of these Here, then, they lay from Wednesday morning till Saturday night, without one bit of bread, or drop of drink or light or any to ask how they did. They were, therefore, here in evil case, and were far from friends and acquaintance. Now in this place Christian had double sorrow because it was through his unadvised counsel that they were brought into this distress.

Now Giant Despair had a wife, and her name was Diffidence. So when he was gone to bed he told his wife what he had done; to wit, that he had taken a couple of prisoners and cast them into his dungeon for trespassing on his grounds. Then he asked her what also he had best. do further to them. So she asked him what they were, whence they came, and whither they were bound; and he told her. Then she counseled him that when he arose in the morning he should beat them without any mercy.

So, when he arose, he getteth him a grievous crab tree cudgel, and goes down into the dungeon to them, and there first falls to rating them as if they were dogs, although they gave him never a word of distaste; then he falls upon them, and beats them fearfully, in such sort that they were not able to help themselves or to turn