sked Keith not once, but many times.

"That is God creating the world," explained his mother.

"But I don't see the world."

"It is just coming out," she said, pointing to the rocks.

"Who's God," was Keith's next question as a rule.

"He is the father of the whole universe," the mother said reverently.

"Papa's too," asked the boy once, and seeing his mother nod assent, he
cried jubilantly:

"Then he must be my grandfather, whose portrait you haven't got!"

More frequently he stopped short as soon as he heard about the universal
fatherhood. That was grown-up talk to him, and like much else, it
carried no meaning to his mind. Nor did he waste much thought on it
after having asked once if he could see God and been told that no man
could do that and live. His mind was occupied with food and clothes and
toys and people and things. What could never be seen was easily
dismissed--much more easily than the spook that one of the servant girls
insisted on having seen, thus making Keith's father so angry that he
nearly discharged her on the spot. And from that first picture in the
Bible the boy turned impatiently to another further on, where a small
boy with a sword almost as big as himself was cutting the head off a man
much taller than Keith's father. And at the top of each page appeared
big black letters which he could recognize almost as easily as those in
the a-b-c book, although they were differently shaped and much more
pretty to look at.

To Keith this opening up of a new world was exclusively pleasant at
first, and so it was to his mother, but other people seemed to be
troubled by it at times. One day his free-spoken aunt was visiting with
them, and, as usual, disagreeing with Keith's mother, who evidently felt
one of her dark spells approaching. Wishing to express her disagreement
at some particular point quite forcibly, but wishing also to keep the
listening boy from enriching his vocabulary with a term of doubtful
desirability, she took the precaution to spell out the too
picturesque word:

"R-o-t!" Just then she caught a gleam of aroused interest in Keith's
eyes, and to make assurance doubly sure, she hastened to add:
"Says rod!"

"No," Keith objected promptly. "It says rot, and I want to know what it
means."

"I knew that small pigs also have ears, but I didn't know they could
spell," was her amused comment, uttered in a tone that touched something
in Keith's inside most pleasantly. Then, however, she