a mixture of paternal tenderness and severity, anxiety and confidence, administers his last dying counsels.

His work is done; nature can do no more; the voice fails, the limbs contract, the breath departs, the artery beats no more; the heart of Jacob is at length at rest.

His life of one hundred and forty-seven years is ended; of which not above a ninth part of it passed in any tolerable degree of peace and comfort, and that portion of it at a period when the heart has scarcely any taste of pleasure at all.

Slowly and sadly they bore him to his last resting place, in Canaan; but why should they mourn the good man's pilgrimage ended, which he had long since pronounced "Evil" indeed.

Few men have experienced greater varieties, greater reverses of condition than the patriarch, Jacob. But we find him perpetually gathering strength from the hardships which he endured, supporting a life of uninterrupted, unutterable affliction with patience and fortitude, suffering and feeling as a man, but enduring and overcoming as a saint, and at length closing the extended scene of woe with the triumph of a believer exulting in the bright, unclouded prospects of immortality.

CHAPTER V.

Joseph.

HIS DREAMS; SOLD BY HIS BRETHREN; IMPRISONED IN EGYPT; HIS FINAL
PROMOTION; MAKES HIMSELF KNOWN TO HIS BRETHREN; SENDS
FOR HIS FATHER; DEATH AT AN ADVANCED AGE.

From the

FTER the statement of the single circumstance of his birth, we hear nothing more of Joseph, until he attained his seventeenth year, when the sacred historian introduces him to us with wonderful art and skill.

very first moment we become interested in him. He is the son of beauteous Rachel, who had long since