So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not, but they are infallible natural critics. This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often the case with the very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical acquaintance with Adam and Eve. The thought of little children passing through the Christmas season without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings. He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the children received his confidences with apathy and silence. Never, even at the end of a conference year, have I seen William so industrious and so much the mendicant. He persecuted the merchants in the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressing doll babies. He shamed the stingiest man in the town into giving him a flour sack full of the most disgraceful-looking candy I ever saw. "William!" I exclaimed, when he brought home this last trophy, "you will kill them." "But," he replied, "for one little hour they will be happy and the next time I tell them anything, though it should be compound Scriptures, they will believe me."