ther, who was listening, smiled slowly. "My father gave me a Bible
on my birthday, when I was seven"--she began.

"O mother," interrupted her little girl, "what did grandfather write in
it?"

"Go and look," her mother said. "You will find it on the table by my
bed."

The child eagerly ran out of the room. In a few moments she returned,
the Bible of her mother's childhood in her hands. It also was a
beautiful book; bound, too, in crimson leather, and with the name of its
owner stamped on it in gold. And on the fly-leaf was written,--

"To my daughter, on her seventh birthday, from her father."

Beneath this, however, was inscribed no modern poetry, but

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days
come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no
pleasure in them."

[Illustration: IN THE INFANT CLASS]

The little girl read it aloud. "It sounds as though you wouldn't be
happy if you _didn't_ remember, mother," she said, dubiously.

"Well, darling," her mother replied, "and so you wouldn't."

The child took her own Bible and read aloud the verse her father had
written. "But, mother, this sounds as though you _would_ be happy if you
_did_ remember."

"And so you will, dear," her mother made reply. "It is the same thing,"
she added.

"Is it?" the little girl exclaimed in some surprise. "It doesn't _seem_
quite the same."

The child did not press the question. She left us, to return her
mother's Bible to its wonted place. When she came back, she resumed the
exhibiting of her birthday gifts where it had been interrupted. But
after she had gone out to play I said to her mother, "Are they _quite_
the same--the text in your Bible and the lines in hers?"

"It _is_ rather a long way from Solomon to William Blake, isn't it?" she
exclaimed.

"But I really don't see much difference. The same thing is said, only in
the one case it is a command and in the other it is an impelling
suggestion."

"Isn't that rather a great deal of difference?" I ventured.

"No, I think not," she said, meditatively. "Of course, I admit," she
supplemented, "that the idea of an impelling suggestion appeals to the
imagination more than the idea of a command. But that's the _only_
difference."

It seems to me that this "only" difference is at the very foundation of
the religious training of the children of the present day in our
country. We do our best to awaken their imaginations, to put to the