erly,
between his sobs. "Oh!" ejaculated the girl; and then, after a pause,
"but ye shouldna greet like that--maybe he hasna."

Another. Recently a little fellow came home from school crying bitterly,
and altogether manifesting great sorrow. "What's the matter, Geordie,"
sympathetically inquired his mother, "has onybody been hittin' ye?"
"N-n-n-o," answered the boy between his sobs. "Then, what are you crying
about?" she went on. "Boo! hoo! wee Sammy Sloan's faither an' mither hae
flitted to Coatbrig!" "Tuts, laddie, dinna greet about that," she
exclaimed, re-assuringly, "there's plenty mair laddies bidin' in the
street besides Sammy Sloan that ye can play wi'." "I ken that," said
Geordie, with another sob, "but he was the only yin I could lick."

Children, really, as we have been revealing so frequently here, have the
fresh and original notions of things, and are always frank enough to
give them voice.

A little boy was reading the story of a missionary having been eaten by
cannibals. "Papa," he asked, "will the missionary go to heaven?" "Yes,
my son," replied the father. "And will the cannibals go there, too?"
queried the youthful student. "No," was the reply. After thinking the
matter over for some time, the little fellow exclaimed--"Well, I don't
see how the missionary can go to heaven if the cannibals don't, when
he's inside the cannibals."

One Sunday evening, while sitting on his mother's knee listening to the
story of Jonah being swallowed by the whale, a little fellow looked up
seriously into her face and asked, "Ma, did Jonah wear his slippers in
the whale's belly? Because, if he didna, the tackets in his boots wad
tear a' its puddin's."

Dr. John Ker of Edinburgh, in his recently published volume of
reminiscences--_Memories Grave and Gay_--tells of how "in a Banffshire
manse one Sunday evening, all the family were sitting quietly reading in
the drawing-room, when the youngest boy, with a laudable thirst for
knowledge, went up to his mother and asked a question, for the answer
to which she referred him to me. Coming up to me, he said--

"'Mr. Ker, is it true that the devil goes about like a roaring lion?"

"'It must,' I replied, 'be true, for it is in the Bible.'

"This was followed by another question which I did not attempt to
answer--

"'Then, wha keeps his fire in when he's gaun aboot?'"

"Do you know, mamma, I don't believe Solomon was so rich after all?"
observed a sharp boy to his mother, wh