“Who was Martin Luther? Why did he leave the Catholic Church? What were indulgences?” “You gave the Pope lots of money, sir, and he gave you dispensations.” This was from our little portress. There was another little shrimp of a thing, with wonderful, long-slit, flashing eyes, who could answer anything almost, and whom the other little girls accordingly brought forward in triumph from a back row. “Give me an instance of a free country?” asks the tired questioner. “England, sir!” cry the little girls in a shout. “And now of a country which is not free.” “America,” cry two little voices; and then one adds, “Because there are slaves, sir.” “And France,” says a third; “and we have seen the emperor in the picture-shops.” As I listen to them, I cannot help wishing that many of our little Christians were taught to be as independent and self-respecting in their dealings with the grown-up people who come to look at them. One would fancy that servility was a sacred institution, we cling to it so fondly. We seem to expect an absurd amount of respect from our inferiors; we are ready to pay back just as much to those above us in station: and hence I think, notwithstanding all the kindness of heart, all the well-meant and well-spent exertion we see in the world, there is often too great an inequality between those who teach and those who would learn, those who give and those whose harder part it is to receive. We were quite sorry at last when the doctor made a little bow, and said, “Good morning, young ladies,” quite politely, to his pupils. It was too late to stop and talk to the little boys down below, but we went for a minute into an inner room out of the large boys’ schoolroom, and there we found half-a-dozen little men, with their hats on their heads, sitting on their benches, reading the _Psalms_ in Hebrew; and so we stood, for this minute before we came away, listening to David’s words spoken in David’s tongue, and ringing rather sadly in the boys’ touching childish voice.