The somersaultic cleverness by which a child will get out of an awkward situation has been often revealed, but seldom with more humour than in the two succeeding illustrations. A minister returning from church towards the manse on a Sunday, came suddenly on a boy leaning earnestly over the parapet of a bridge with a short rod and a long string having a baited hook on the far end, by which he was trying his luck in the burn beneath. "Boy," he exclaimed severely, "is this a day on which you should be catching fish?" "Wha's catchin' fish?" drawled the budding Isaac Walton; "I'm juist tryin' to droon this worm." The next boy was yet cleverer--alike in fishing and in speech. He had several trout dangling from his hand by a string when he met the minister abruptly in a quick bend of the road. There was no chance of escape; but his ready wit saved him. He walked boldly forward, and taking the first word as the two were about to meet, he dangled the trout-hand high, looked the minister square in the face, and exclaimed, "That sorts them for snappin' at flees on the Sabbath!" and passed hence, leaving his anticipated accuser flabbergasted. Ruskin says of children: "They are forced by nature to develop their powers of invention, as a bird its feathers of flight;" and we might add, remarks another writer, "that the inventive faculty, like a bird, is apt, when fully grown, to fly away. Then, when their own imaginative resources begin to fail them, one observes children begin to read books of adventure with avidity--at the age, say, of ten or twelve years. Before that, no Rover of the Andes or Erling the Bold can equal the heroic achievements they evolve from their inner consciousness." Who, for instance, could hope to "put a patch" on the experience of those two little boys who spent a snowy day during the Christmas holidays tiger-shooting in their father's dining-room; and as one, making his cautious way among the legs of the dinner-table, for the nonce a pathless jungle, was hailed by the other with, "Any tigers there, Bill?" he answered gloriously: "Tigers? I'm knee-deep in them!" That excellent story recalls to me another, not unlike it. Also of a Christmas time. The children had asked permission to get up a play, and it had been granted on the condition that they did it all themselves without help or hint. As the eldest was only ten they accepted the condition with alacrity, for young children hate to be interfered with and hampered by their elders. When the evening came and the family and audience had collected, the curtain was drawn back and revealed the heroine (aged nine), who stated with impassioned sobs that her husband had been in South Africa for the past three years, but that she was expecting his return. Truly enough the hero (aged ten) entered, and proceeded, after affectionate but hasty greetings, to give his wife an eloquent account of his doings, the battles he had fought, the Boers he had killed, and the honours he had won.