"Mamma, what is the text that says it will please Him?" he asked, looking up inquiringly, for it had always been a habit with her to enforce her teachings with a passage of Scripture. "There are a great many that teach it more or less directly," she said; "we are to be diligent in business, to improve our talents and use them in God's service; children are to obey their parents; and both your grandpa and I have directed you to learn that lesson." "Mamma, I will do my very best," he said cheerfully, and she saw as she left the room that he was really trying to redeem the promise. An hour later he came to her with a very bright face, to say that grandpa had pronounced his recitation quite perfect and released him from confinement. Her pleased look, her smile, her kiss were a sweet reward and a strong incentive to continuance in well-doing. CHAPTER X. "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." --_Isaiah_ 8:20. Some years before this Elsie had built a little church on the plantation, entirely at her own expense, for the use of her dependents and of her own family when sojourning at Viamede. The membership was composed principally of blacks. A few miles distant was another small church of the same denomination, attended by the better class of whites; planters and their families. To these two congregations conjointly Mr. Mason had ministered for a long while, preaching to the one in the morning, to the other in the afternoon of each Sabbath. He had, however, been called to another field of labor, a few weeks previous to the arrival of our friends, leaving the two congregations pastorless, and the pretty cottage built for him at Viamede without a tenant. Still they were not entirely without the preaching of the word, now one and now another coming to supply the pulpits for a Sunday or two. At present they were filled by a young minister who came as a candidate, and whose services had been engaged for several weeks. Elsie and her family were paying no visits now in this time of mourning, but nothing but sickness, or a very severe storm, ever kept them from church. They attended both services, and in the evening the older ones gathered about the table in the library with their Bibles, and, with Cruden's Concordance and other helps at hand, spent an hour or more in the study of the word. "Mamma," said little Rosie, one Sunday as they were walking slowly homeward from the nearer church, "why don't we have a minister that believes the Bible?" "My child, don't you think Mr. Jones believes it?" "No, mamma," most emphatically, "because he contradicts it; he said there's only one devil, and my Bible says Jesus cast out devils--seven out of Mary Magdalen, and ever so many out of one man, besides other ones out of other folks."