e as a squirrel's skin. In another place William discovered
a boy of seven, who declined to believe or even to hope in Santa Clans.
He was thin, with sad, hungry eyes, ragged and bare-footed as usual.
He had no animation, he simply could not summon enough energy to
believe in the incredible.

I shall never forget this child's face. The Sabbath after Christmas we
had a voluntary Sunday school on our hands. A score of odd-looking
little boy and girl caterpillars appeared at church, excited,
mysteriously curious, like queer young creatures who have experienced a
miracle. They entered immediately into full fellowship with William.
They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried
the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he
said to the uttermost. Only once was there any symptom of higher
criticism. This was a certain Sabbath morning in the Sunday school
when William told the story of the forty and two children who were
devoured by two she bears because they had made fun of a bald-headed
man.

"I don't believe that tale!" was the astounding irreverent comment. It
proceeded from the same incipient agnostic who could not believe in
Santa Clans.

"Why?" William was indiscreet enough to ask.

"Because if only two bears had eat that many children it would have
busted 'em wide open."

No one smiled. William faced five little grimy-faced boys on the bench
before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational
interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the
retina of each, and it was too much for him.

"We will pass on to the next verse," he announced, leaving the
bear-expositor mystified, but in stubborn possession of his convictions.

Sometimes in these latter years, when things went hard with us, there
would come a flash of memory and William and I would see the face of
some child always as if the sun was shining on it, looking at us,
believing in us from far down the years. And it has helped, often more
than the recollection of older, wiser saints. Our experience was that
the faces of the children we had known lasted better in memory than
those of older people. And they always look right, as if God had just
made them.

It was always nip and tuck, in the records of William's ministry,
whether he would perform more marriage ceremonies or preach more
funerals. Some years the weddings would have it. Then again, the dead
got the be