Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled God with a little g.
As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going "down—down—DOWN—into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say, at each of his failures, "if you only could do it the way Mr. Murphy did—and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,—just like he was associating with a body in their own parlour—and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he'd been!"
However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as:
"Xerxes the Great did die
And so must you and I."
"As runs the glass
Man's life must pass."
"Thy life to mend
God's book attend."
From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being:
Uncertainty Of Life
"I in the burying-place may see
Graves shorter there than I.
From Death's arrest no age is free,
Young children, too, may die.
"My God, may such an awful sight
Awakening be to me;
Oh, that by early grace, I might
For death prepared be!"