His somewhat narrow range of reading, had you followed it by his careful
markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase, bore
the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement. His
life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much
leisure for reading, and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into
evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady, with
whom as a young man he had boarded, and for whose memory all his life
he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship.
The name of Mrs. Quiggins, whose portrait had still a conspicuous niche
among the _lares_ of the household,--a little thin silvery old
widow-lady, suggesting great sadness, much gentleness, and a little
severity,--had thus become for the family of James Mesurier a symbol of
sanctity, with which a properly accredited saint of the calendar could
certainly not, in that Protestant home, have competed. It was she who
had given him that little well-worn Bible which lay on the table with
his letters and papers, as he wrote under the lamplight, and than which
a world full of sacred relics contains none more sacred.
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