tism?" asked a lady. There
was silence for some seconds, and then a girl broke in triumphantly
with, "The baby, please, mem."

The Rev. David Macrae tells that in a Brooklyn Sunday school a small boy
was asked the question, "Who was the first man?" and, with
characteristic American cocksureness, he immediately replied, "General
Washington." The teacher smiled, then asked--"Did you never hear of
Adam?" "Why, yes," responded the child, "I've heard of Adam; but I
didn't know you were counting foreigners."

Recently, in a Sunday school in Scotland, a little boy, who had been
transferred to a new class, was asked on arrival if he had had the
Shorter Catechism. For a moment he looked puzzled, and then
replied--"I'm no sure, mem, until I ask my mither; but I ken I've had
the measles."

Elsewhere, a teacher had been carefully explaining the parable of the
Prodigal Son, and that done, she proceeded to put questions. All went
well until near the close, when she asked, "Now, tell me who was not
pleased to see the prodigal son when he came home," and to her
consternation got the reply, "Please, ma'am, the fatted calf."

In a Sunday school in Ayrshire, attended chiefly by miners' children,
the lesson for the day had been the parable of the ten wise and ten
foolish virgins, and the teacher asked--"Can any one of you tell me why
the virgins' lamps went out?" "I ken," immediately responded the dullest
boy in the class; "it was the wicks that was needin' pykin'."

And the story is hoary with age of how a teacher, when the lesson had
been read which bore on Jacob's dream, invited questions from the class,
and how one little fellow asked--"Why did the angels need a ladder for
ascending and descending when they had wings and could flee?" The
teacher was nonplussed, but got out of the difficulty by
saying--"Perhaps some of the other boys can answer." "I think I ken,"
ventured a little fellow, whose father was a bird fancier, "maybe they
wad be moultin' at the time."

His solutions may be extraordinary, but nothing, you see, can baffle the
young wit. It was again in a Sunday school that a teacher had been
instructing a class in the relative positions of man and the lower
animals in the scale of intelligence, and wishing to test how the lesson
had been imbibed, she asked--"Now, what is next to man?" and got the
answer promptly--"His shirt."

"What is meant by a 'hireling'?" was asked of a class in a day-school.
"You are a hireling,"