"Oh, massa, goin' to be a child again, and listen to de words ob Jesus: ''Cept ye be as a little child ye shall not enter de kingdom ob hebben.'"
THE STROKE OF THE PEN.
"You are right, Phœbe; she says so, and the proud old man is wrong—lost, lost!"
"De dear Lord Jesus can save to de uttermost: him dat cometh He will in nowise cast out. Oh, come, dear massa! Look to Him."
"Too late—call Geoffry. I'm dying. I've lived without God, and now I must die without Him. It is just, and it is perdition. But let me tell my son."
They watched and ministered, and Phœbe wept and prayed unchecked for some hours while the mortal struggle lasted, and then there was rest,—for the body at least. The poor neglected soul was gone to its own experiences—somewhere, and the "stroke of the pen" that morning was to leave no pleasant experience of the last act on earth. For wonderful things a stroke of the pen can do. It can sign away an estate of hundreds of years of entailed possession; it can exile the widow and disinherit the orphan, and lay broad acres and stately oaks under the salesman's hammer. It can set idle clerks to work in attorneys' chambers, and make land agents and appraisers speak and look like "monarchs of all they survey."
But that stroke of the pen did a great deal more.
