My mother had read the Scriptures with great care and was not fully persuaded that infant baptism was therein taught, and although a Methodist, she hesitated to give her children to God and the church in this ordinance. Of her six children not one was baptised in infancy, nor did she teach them to "say prayers." It required great faith to depart from so general a custom, but being taught of God, she dared to do it. The reader will observe in my brother's poem, which actually reproduces the scenes of our childhood, that there is no picture of a child with clasped hands kneeling down and lisping his evening prayer by his mother's knee. No such picture was common there. Early in the days of her life as a mother she abandoned the custom. Prayerless the six children went to bed, and prayerless they went to their daily tasks, and this not through negligence but through principle. She thought "saying prayers" a grave species of trifling; and, as father worked sometimes nights and sometimes days, regularity in family prayer, if desired, could not be had. I am not certain that _it was desired_. Religion, not even in its forms, was forced upon the children but on the contrary it was rendered so attractive, that the children of that household would crowd around that mother in the evening and tease her to tell them a story. The story would always be told just before bed-time and would be likely to end with a solemn appeal to our consciences, the reading of a chapter from the old family Bible, a prayer and then all the children were hurried to bed. This was not a nightly occurrence, but seemed wholly dependent upon our asking. The stories were always from the Bible and to our little minds were wonderfully well told; often filling us with such hatred toward bad men, that on seeing their pictures we would wish to destroy them, and making us cry over those that had suffered. Such was the character of the religious training she gave her household. I wish it were possible to obtain one of those stories just as she told it. The nearest approach to anyone of them is the little story about "SELF" told with her pen many years later, when writing was to her a great difficulty, to two of her grandchildren. While it may be interesting, I am sure it bears but a faint comparison to those that her own children heard in their childhood from her own lips. I had thought to pass over this part of my mother's work for fear it might not be understood; or that others attempting to imitate her herein might suffer great loss in their families. Where the religious care of the children is left to the mother, and she is not specially gifted, it is perhaps better to teach by rote and by form; but where conditions are otherwise, it is better to teach the children directly the doctrines of religion and let them make their own forms. Religion and reverence for God and sacred things, then becomes a part of their nature and is more likely to be sincere.