Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac, and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the housetops;--all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them. Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked, and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great éclat, in a broad, free-verse style: “Wine is a maw-aw-ker, Strong drink is ray-ay-ging, And whoever is deceived there-by-y, Is not--wise!”