Somewhat later I chanced to meet the child's mother. It was not long before she spoke to me concerning her little girl's membership in the Episcopal Sunday-school. "What were her father and I to do?" the mother said. "We didn't feel justified in standing in her way. She wanted to be christened; it seemed to mean something real to her--" she broke off. "What _were_ we to do?" she repeated. "It would be a dreadful thing to check a child's aspiration toward God! Of course she is only a little girl, and she wanted to be like the others. Her father and I thought of that, naturally. But--" Again she stopped. "One can never tell," she went on, "what is in the mind of a child, nor what may be happening to its spirit. Samuel was a very little child when God spoke to him," she concluded, simply. Quite as far as that mother, has another mother of my acquaintance let her little girl go along the way of religious freedom. One day I went with her and the child to an Italian jewelry shop. Among the things there was a rosary of coral and silver. The little girl, attracted by its glitter and color, seized it and slipped it over her head. "Look, mother," she said, "see this lovely necklace!" Her mother gently took it from her. "It isn't a necklace," she explained; "it is called a rosary. You mustn't play with it; because it is something some people use to say their prayers with." The child's mother is of Scotch birth and New England upbringing. The little girl has been accustomed to a form of religion and to an attitude toward the things of religion that are beautiful, but austerely beautiful. She is an imaginative child; and she caught eagerly at the poetical element thus, for the first time, associated with prayer. "Tell me how!" she begged. When next I was in the little girl's bedroom, I saw the coral and silver rosary hanging on one of the head-posts of her bed. "Yes, my dear," her mother explained to me, "I got the rosary for her. She wanted it--'to say my prayers with,' she said; so I got it. After all, the important thing is that she says her prayers." Among my treasures I have a rosary, brought to me from the Holy Land. I have had it for a long time, and it has hung on the frame of a photograph of Bellini's lovely Madonna. This little girl has always liked that picture, and she has often spoken to me about it. But she had never mentioned the rosary, which not only is made of dark wood, but is darker still with its centuries of age. One day after the rosary of pink coral and bright silver had been given her she came to see me. Passing through the room where the Madonna is, she stopped to look at it. At once she exclaimed, "_You_ have a rosary!" "Yes," I said; "it came from the Holy Land." I took it down, and put it into her hands. "It has been in Bethlehem," I went on, "and in Jerusalem. It is very old; it belonged to a saint--like St. Francis, who was such friends with the birds, you remember."