ll I put meal in't, father?" he asked.
"No." "Oh, weel, then"--and he turned to go back--"ye'll need to wait
till somebody gangs to the well." But to return to children I have known
for yet one or two more illustrations. I was at a tea-table one
afternoon where the company was mostly composed of the smaller fry, and
an incident, important to all, was mentioned, which had happened some
seven or eight years before. Several of the older children declared,
truthfully, that they remembered it quite well. "So do I mind o' it,"
asserted a little fellow about five. "How could you mind o' it?"
questioned scornfully an older brother; "you wasna born at the time." "I
ken," as scornfully returned the younger theologian; "I was dust at the
time; but I mind o' it weel enough." Here is the verbatim copy of a
letter written since by the hand of that same boy--in a country village
in Perthshire--where he has been staying continuously for several years,
and addressed to his father in Glasgow:--"Dear Pa, The Rabbits is all
dead. Worried with dogs. The gold fishes is dead. Died with the cold.
The cat has had kittens, four of them, and the rest of us is all well."
The remark of a prominent Scottish novelist who recently passed the
epistle through his hands was--"That's style, the most crisp and
picturesque. And then--'the rest of us'--how beautifully innocent!"

The little girl of a friend of mind--while still of very tender
years--was first taken to church by her aunt. On the way home, and soon
after leaving the portals of the sacred edifice, she looked up solemnly
in her guardian's face, and, "Auntie," she asked, "was yon God on the
mantel-piece?" She referred doubtless to the minister in the pulpit.
Don't think of irreverence, my reader! The child, in its atmosphere of
perfect innocence, knows not the word. And bear that in mind further
when I tell you of a little boy and girl--both of whom I know well--who
were having a walk with me one Sunday in early Autumn, when suddenly a
railway train appeared in view. A train on Sunday! They were staggered
by the sight; and the boy demanded to know why it should be there. "Oh,
I know," exclaimed the girl, after some reflection; "it'll be God coming
back from his holidays." The question, "Can prayer be answered?" may be
often discussed by grown-up minds. It is never raised by the children.
No doubts trouble them in that relation. They are quite certain they
will get what they ask for. Perfect confid