in my place, it is meet that you should be near God."

And God smiled because he knew in advance what their answer would be.

"Our happiness is service. This puts us close to God. Do you not serve
your father and mother? Do they not serve Him who serves us?"

And suddenly he saw that the table had grown larger and that new
guests were seated about it. They were the father and mother of his
mother and father, and the generations that had gone before them.

Evening fell. The older of the people slumbered. Love held the poet
and his sweetheart. But God to whom they had done honor, took up his
way again like the poor on the great highways, those who have only a
morsel of bread in their wallet, and whom the magistrates arrest at
the town gates, and throw into prison, since they know not how to
write their name.

CHARITY CHILDREN

One day the souls of the charity children cried out to God. It was on
a stormy evening when their fevers and wounds made them suffer more
than ever. They lay white with grief in their rows of beds, above
which ignoble science had hung the placards of their maladies.

They were sad, very sad, for it was a day of festival. Their tiny arms
were stretched out on the coverlets, and with their transparent hands
they touched the meager toys that pious grand ladies had brought them.
They did not even know what to do with these playthings. A President
of the Republic had visited them, but they had not understood what it
meant.

Their souls cried out toward God. They said:

"We are the daughters of misery, of scrofula, and of syphilis. We are
the daughters of daughters of shame."

"I," said one, "was dragged out of a cesspool where in her distraction
my mother, the servant of an inn, had thrown me." Another said: "I
was born of a child with an enormous head that had a red gap in the
forehead. My father killed my mother, and he killed himself."

Still others said:

"We are the survivors of abortions and infanticides. Our mothers are
on the lists. Our fathers, cigar in mouth, saunter smiling amid the
tumult of business and the markets. We are born like kings with a
crown on our heads, a crown of red rash."

And God, hearing their cry, came down toward these souls. He entered
the hospital of more than human sorrows. At his approach the fumes
rose from the medicaments which the good sisters had prepared, as
though from censers by the side of the child martyrs, who sat up in
their narrow co