tumn, with a boy older than myself, gathering hazel nuts.
The sun had sunk behind the hills, and the shadows of twilight were
gathering in the valley. It was a beautiful and calm evening, the
solemn stillness of which, was only broken by the 'tza! tza!' of
thousands of katydids among the bushes. I asked my companion what it
was that made the noise I heard, and he, supposing that I referred to
sounds that came up occasionally from the lake, after listening for a
moment, answered that it was made by the wild geese. In my simplicity
I believed it, and it was not until I caught, the next season, a
katydid while it was in the act of singing, that I discovered that the
music among the hazel bushes was not made by the wild geese."

"I never respect a man or woman," said Spalding, "whose heart does not
warm towards little children, who takes no pleasure nor interest in
their society, who has no patience to listen to their simple thoughts
expressed in their simple way. 'Mother,' said a little child of four
or five years of age, one evening when the summer air was warm, and
the skies were bright above, as she sat beside her mother, on a bench
beneath the spreading branches of the tall old elms in front of the
house; 'mother, what makes the stars come out, only after the dark has
come down, and why don't the moon go up into the sky like the sun in
the day time?' I listened anxiously for the reply. I knew the kind
heart of that mother, how truthful it was, and how earnest and pure in
its affection for its gentle and only darling. 'Sit here upon my lap,
Mary,' said the mother, 'and I will try and explain it all so that you
will understand it.' And she told the little child how God made the
sun to rule the day, and the moon and the stars to rule the night; how
that the stars were always in the sky, but how the superior brightness
of the sun put them out in the day time; how the stars, that twinkled
like little rush-lights in the heavens, were great worlds, a thousand
times larger than this earth, made and placed away up in the sky, by
the same great and good God who made the world we live in. Little Mary
was silent and attentive to the simple lecture, until it was finished,
and then asked, so simply and confidingly, that I could not help
smiling to think that the mind of childhood should be running upon a
subject, and seeking a solution of the same question which has puzzled
the profoundest philosophers through all time: 'Mother,' sai