illest in church, but he was a reproof
even unto his elders. One Sunday afternoon, in the Connecticut village
where my brother-in-law used to spend his summers, when half of the
congregation was slumbering under the combined effect of the heat, a
lunch of cheese and apples, and the sermon, my nephew, then aged five,
sat bolt upright in the pew, winkless as a demon hearing a new candidate
suspected of shakiness on a "a card'nal p'int," and mortified almost to
death poor old Mrs. Pringle, who, compassionating his years, had handed
him a sprig of her "meetin'-seed" over the back of the seat, by saying,
in a loud and stern voice: "I don't eat things in church."

I should have spanked the boy when I got home, but Lu, with tears in her
eyes, quoted something about the mouths of babes and sucklings.

Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him. I think
they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener
does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and, so long as he was
not absolutely sick, the graver he was, the better. He was a sensitive
plant, a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing. But when
in his tenth year he had the measles, and was narrowly carried through,
Lu got a scare about him. During his convalescence, reading aloud a life
of Henry Martyn to amuse him, she found in it a picture of that young
apostle preaching to a crowd of Hindus without any boots on. An American
mother's association of such behavior with croup and ipecac was too
strong to be counteracted by known climatic facts; and from that hour,
as she never had before, Lu realized that being a missionary might
involve going to carry the gospel to the heathen in your stocking-feet.

When they had decided that such a life would not do for him, his
training had almost entirely unfitted him for any other active calling.
The strict propriety with which he had been brought up had resulted
in weak lungs, poor digestion, sluggish circulation, and torpid liver.
Moreover, he was troubled with the painfulest bashfulness which ever
made a mother think her child too ethereal, or a dispassionate outsider
regard him as too flimsy, for this world. These were weights enough
to carry, even if he had not labored under that heaviest of all, a
well-stored mind.

No misnomer that last to any one who has ever frequented the Atlantic
Docks, or seen storage in any large port of entry. How does a storehouse
look? It's a vast, dark, c