even the neighbours were ashamed to talk loosely or say what they shouldn't before a lad whose whole thought, whose sole endeavour was, "how to realise Christ."

Mother," he once said, as he and Mrs. Davidson stood by the cottage door together, "I mean when I grow up to live as our Lord and Saviour lived when He was on the earth. For though he is God in Heaven he was only man here; and what He did we too can do with His help and the Holy Spirit's."

"He is our example, lad," said his mother reverently. "But I doubt lest you fall by over boldness.'

Then, if imitation is over bold, His life was a delusion, and He is not our example at all," said Joshua. "Which is a saying of the devil."

CHAPTER II.

JOSHUA did not leave home early. He wrought at his father's bench and was content to bide with his people. But his spirit was not dead if his life was uneventful. He gathered about him a few youths of his own age, and held with them prayer meetings and Bible readings, either at home in his father's house, or in the fields when the throng was too great for the cottage. It gave one a feeling as of old primitive times to be sitting there under the clear sky of a summer's evening, with the larks singing over head, and the swallows and sea birds

flashing through the air, the voice of the waves as they beat up against Long Island subdued to a tender murmur that seemed to have a mystery somehow in it, and the young carpenter reading to us of Christ, and praying for the power to be like unto Him in life and heart; praying with an earnestness, a realization, a very passion of entreatynay, I have never heard or seen aught like it since, in church or chapel either!

And then he himself was so unlike other boys. He was so upright, so steadfast! No one ever knew Joshua tell the shadow of a lie, or go back from his word, or play at pretence. And he had such an odd way of coming right home to us. He seemed to

have felt all that we felt,

thought all our thoughts.

and to have

Young as he was,

he was our leader even then. We all looked

for great things from him. I should be laughed at if I said how high our expectations reached.

The youths that Joshua got together as his friends were as well-conditioned a set of lads as you would wish to see; sober, industrious, chaste. They were never in any trouble, and no one could say they had ever heard one of them give back a bad word, whatever the provocation, or say a loose one; but the clergy of their several parishes scouted them, and stood at no evil to say of them. For they were not church-goers ; and that is always an offence to the clergy of country parishes, who treat even the best of the Dissenters as little better than rogues, taking it partly as a personal affront and partly as a moral sin if their parishioners find greater comfort for their

poor

souls else

с

where than under them.

However, for the

matter of that, the lads were of no denomination; and though they prayed much and often, it was neither at church nor chapel; it was at their own houses or in the fields.

Their aim was to be thorough and like Christ. They denounced the sin of luxury among professing Christians, and spared no one, lay or clerical: so did Christ, they said. They set their faces against the priestly class altogether, and maintained that Christ as High Priest needed no subordinate or gobetween, and that the modern parson was only the ancient Pharisee, whom Christ was never weary of denouncing. They were anti-Sabbatarians too, as He had been, and held the doctrine of freedom in Christ throughout. They believed implicitly every word of the Gospels, which they stood by as