The story was having a good effect upon me, when suddenly I came upon a little note appended by the author, and which said the whole was a fiction; that no such person as Ruth Lee had ever lived, and I had been reading what was not true. I did not know then that but few of the Sunday school books are literally true, and I was terribly disappointed. I felt that in losing Ruth I had lost a real friend, and, leaning my head against the tree, I cried for a few moments, thinking to myself, that when I was older I would write a book for children, which should every word be _true_. I am older now—much older than I was then; that Sunday afternoon lies far back in the past; the sister, who might have been Ruth, is dead, and her grave is under a little pine, which whispers softly to the wind, of the gentle sleeper below. There are more graves than hers near to the pine. The household is broken up, and children of another name than mine read under the old apple-tree in the orchard, or search for violets and buttercups down by the meadow brook. I have learned to know that stories of fictitious people, if true to life and written with an earnest purpose to do good, may oftentimes be as beneficial as stories of real people; but I have through all adhered to my resolution, that my first story for children should be true; and so this bright May morning, when the sky is beautifully blue, and the grass in the garden is green and fresh with yesterday’s rain, I begin this story of the Font, which shall in every particular be _true_. CHAPTER II. SOMETHING ABOUT THE CHURCH, AND THE CHILDREN WHO BOUGHT THE FONT.