Streams in the Desert May 31 Daily Devotional

Like a shock of corn fully ripe (Job 5 26).
A gentleman, writing about the breaking up of old ships recently
said that it is not the age alone which improves the quality of the fiber in the wood of an old vessel, but the straining and wrenching of the vessel by the sea, the chemical action of the bilge water,
and of many kings of cargoes.
Some planks and veneers made from an oak beam which had been part
of a ship eighty years old were exhibited a few years ago at a
fashionable furniture store on Broadway, New York, and attracted general notice for the exquisite coloring and beautiful grain.
Equally striking were some beams of mahogany taken from a bark which sailed the seas sixty years ago. The years and the traffic
had contracted the pores and deepened the color, until it looked as superb in its chromatic intensity as an antique Chinese vase. It
was made into a cabinet and has today a place of honor in the drawing-room of a wealthy New York family.
So there is a vast difference between the quality of old people who have lived flabby, self-indulgent, useless fives, and the fiber of
those who have sailed all seas and carried all cargoes as the servants of God and the helpers of their fellow men.
Not only the wrenching and straining of life, but also something of the sweetness of the cargoes carried get into the very pores of
fiber of character. --Louis Albert Banks.
When the sun goes below the horizon he is not set; the heavens glow for a full hour after his departure. And when a great and good man
sets, the sky of this world is luminous long after he is out of
sight Such a man cannot die out of this world. When he goes he leaves behind him much of himself. Being dead, he speaks.
--Beecher.
When Victor Hugo was past eighty years of age he gave expression to
his religious faith in these sublime sentences: "I feel in myself
the future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once
cut down. The new shoots are livelier than ever. I am rising toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The earth gives me its
generous sap, but Heaven lights me with its unknown worlds. "You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of the bodily

powers., Why, then, is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my
heart. I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the
violets, and the roses as at twenty years. The nearer I approach
the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple."