nd helped your Ma with the dishes, a boy who always
wiped your feet before you came in, a boy that never got kept in at
school, a boy that cried pretty easy, a nice, pale boy, with bulging
blue eyes, you came to Sabbath-school and disgorged verses like
buck-shot out of a bag. The four-to-eight-verse boys sat and listened,
and improved their minds. There was generally one other boy like you
in the class, and it was nip-and-tuck between you which should get the
prize, until finally you came one Sunday, all bloated up with 238 verses
in your craw, and he quit discouraged. The prize was yours. It was a
beautiful little Bible with a brass clasp; it had two tiny silk strings
of an old-gold color for bookmarks, and gilt edges all around that made
the leaves stick together at first. It was printed in diamond type, so
small it made your ears ring when you tried to read it.

Other faculties than that of memory were called into action in those
days by problems like these: "Who was the meekest man? Who was the
strongest man? Who was the father of Zebedee's children? Who had the
iron bedstead, and whose thumbs and great-toes were cut off?" To set a
child to find these things in the Bible without a concordance seems
to us as futile as setting him to hunt a needle in a haystack. But our
fathers were not so foolish as we like to think them; they didn't care
two pins if we never discovered who had the iron bedstead, but they
knew that, leafing over the book, we should light upon treasure where
we sought it not, kernels of the sweetest meat in the hardest shells,
stories of enthralling interest where we least expected them, but, most
of all, and best of all, texts that long afterward in time of trouble
should come to us, as it were the voice of one that also had eaten the
bread of affliction, calling to us across the chasm of the centuries
and saying: "O, tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He shall
comfort thine heart."

In the higher classes, that still were not high enough to rank with Mr.
Parker's, the exegetical powers were stimulated in this wise: "'And they
sung a hymn and went out.' Now what do you understand by that?" We told
what we "understood," and what we "held," and what we "believed," and
laid traps for the teacher and tried to corner him with irrelevant
texts wrenched from their context. He had to be an able man and a
nimble-witted man. Mere piety might shine in the prayer-meeting, in the
class-room, at the quar