"Did the clergyman take any of my texts to-day for his sermon?" asked the younger one eagerly, as he took hold of Humphrey's hand. (Miles was learning the beatitudes, and asked the question regularly every Sunday.) "No, not one of them. He got a text out of the very last bit of the whole Bible--'The Revelation.'" "That must be the bit Virginie never will read to me. She says I should not understand it. Do you understand the Revelations, Humphie?" "Yes," returned Humphrey, promptly. "Virginie doesn't," said Miles rather puzzled, "and she says very few grown-up people do." "Virginie is French," retorted Humphrey, "and the Revelations are written in English. Of course she can't understand them as well as I do. There goes a rabbit. Let's run after it." And Miles, perfectly satisfied with the explanation, followed his brother, panting into the fern. In the afternoon the gentlemen went again to church, and as Virginie was at liberty to do the same, the children were left under the care of the housemaid. Humphrey was learning a hymn, and, for once in his life, giving his whole attention to his task. Miles, sitting on the housemaid's lap, was turning over the leaves of the "Peep of Day," and gleaning his ideas of sacred characters from the illustrations of that well-known work. He stopped in great amazement before the representation of Lazarus rising from the tomb, and demanded an explanation. Jane, who had an idea that everything connected with death should be most carefully concealed from children, answered evasively that it was nothing, and tried to turn over the page, but boys are not so easily baulked. Had Miles been a girl, he would probably have been satisfied to pass over the picture without further inquiry; girls' minds take a very superficial grasp of a subject; they are content to get at the shell of knowledge, and to leave the kernel untasted. Being a boy, Miles raised his large, grave eyes to Jane's face with an inquiring expression. "Why don't you tell me?" he asked, laying a detaining hand on the leaf; "I want to know all about it. What is that great hole? and why is the man all sewed up in white?" Jane, driven into a corner, admitted that the hole was a grave. "But, lor! master Miles," added she, "you don't know nothing about them things, and if you want to know you must ask your pa!" "Of course I know people die," said Miles, simply, "because my mamma's dead; so you're quite wrong, Jane, to say I don't understand those sort of things. I know all about it. When people die they are packed up in a box and put into the ground, and then if they've been good, God will come some day and unpack them." Humphrey had joined the group just in time to hear the end of the explanation, and he met Jane's eye and smile with all the conscious superiority of his three years advance in religious knowledge.