I cannot recall all the means that were taken to make us learn those verses. Of course there was no whipping in the Sunday-school as there was in the district school, and the inducements given us were of a somewhat higher kind. I especially remember that for every certain number of dozen verses we learned we were given a red card; this card had a picture of a dove on the top and some verses below it, and a red border around the edges; then I know that for a certain number of red cards we were given a blue card similar to the red, except that the dove had been changed to a little spring lamb. I cannot recall what we got for the blue card; probably nothing at all. It was no doubt the ultimate. There must be somewhere an ultimate with children as with men. I remember that at Christmas time we had a tree, and the two churches used sometimes to get up a rivalry as to the value of the presents, and there were little desertions back and forth on this account. I know we all thought that the number and value of the presents would be in some way related to the number of verses we had learned; and I am sure that the number of scholars and the regularity of attendance always increased toward Christmas time. I must have learned a great many million verses first and last, but none of them seem to have made any impression on my mind, and I can now recall only a few about John the Baptist, who came preaching in the wilderness of Judæa, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and whose food was locusts and wild honey, and who called on all the people in the wilderness to repent, for the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Now, I am certain that John the Baptist did not seem a real man to me, and that I had no idea of what the wilderness of Judæa was like or what sort of people lived there. All this was only so many verses to be learned, for which I would get so many cards. I believe I thought that John the Baptist had some sort of relation to the Baptist church, and I wondered how he could live on locusts and wild honey; for I had seen locusts, and they were only a sort of flying bug, and no more fit to eat than a grasshopper or a horse-fly. I am sure that I thought this a very slim diet for a man,—even for a preacher, who we thought cared little about what he ate. I have grown older now, and wiser, and have heard many John the Baptists preaching in the wilderness and calling unwilling sinners to repentance; and now I do not so much wonder about the locusts, but I can scarcely understand how he was so fortunate as to get the wild honey. But the one thing that most impresses me as I look back on the day-school and the Sunday-school where we spent so many of our childhood hours is the unreality of it all. Surely none of the lessons seemed in any way related to our lives. None of them impressed our minds, or gave us a thought or feeling about the problems we were soon to face.