The church members no longer rent the same pews year after year. Now when I go home I look in vain for the old families, or their representatives, in their accustomed places. Scattered here and there throughout the congregation, like lost sheep, I see a few of the brethren and sisters who in the early days sat with us “under the droppings of the sanctuary.” I would like to see them once again in the places that knew them in those long-gone days; would like to sit with Father and Mother in our own pew; join in the hymns, and once again feel at home in the old church; for, however far I have wandered from the old paths, they must always be sacred to me. CHAPTER V “AS TWIG IS BENT” The books one reads in childhood and youth are, of course, among the most potent formative influences of those periods. My post-Mother-Goose reading consisted largely of the Child’s Bible, later the Bible itself, and the goody-good Sunday-school books, two or three of Miss Alcott’s, and whatever else I could find in my browsings. How I have cried over the Elsie books and rejoiced over the Gypsy books! Mad-cap Gypsy Breynton and pious Elsie Dinsmore were real beings to me. Sunday afternoons I would read by the west window with the door leading upstairs at just a convenient distance, so that when I found my emotions getting the upper hand, I could at one step open the door, slip upstairs and weep in secret over the woes of my little heroines. I thought the others had no inkling what that sudden plunge meant, but my acute little sister soon learned, and one dreadful Sunday, when I was making a desperate move for the stairway before the torrent should burst, she called out mischievously, “Genie, what are you going upstairs for? It’s warmer down here.”