CHAPTER X.
The Eighty-four Seals.
Merrily the Christmas bells were chiming in the old city of York, on Christmas morning in the year 1890, speaking gaily and joyfully of the Christmas feast, when suddenly there came a change.

The merry peal ceased, and was followed by the quiet sorrowful sound which always speaks of mourning and death, a muffled peal.

News had reached the ringers that the Archbishop of York, who had been known and respected in the city for more than twenty-eight years, had gone home to God.
And as we ate our Christmas dinner that day, as we gathered round the table to eat the fat and drink the sweet, the solemn voice of Old Peter, the great minster bell, was heard tolling for the departed soul.
Truly in the midst of life we are in death, in the midst of joy there comes sorrow, in the midst of festivity we are plunged into mourning.
'Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, Flower and thorn.' So the poet makes the old grandmother sum up her life's story.
And it is just the same in our religious life.

One day the joy of the Lord makes us strong, the next the sense of sin weighs us to the ground; one moment we are ready to overflow with thanksgiving, the next we are down in the dust mourning and weeping.
Just such a change as this, a change from the gay to the solemn, from joy to mourning, from feasting to fasting, comes before us in the Book of Nehemiah.
Look at Jerusalem, as we visit it in imagination to-day, and take a bird's-eye view of the city.

The whole place is mad with joy.