"O, papa! And you are always telling us that we must not think about the morrow, or even the next hour. But, then, that's in the pulpit," she added, with a sly look up at me from under the drooping feather of her pretty hat. "You know very well what I mean, you puss," I answered. "And I don't say one thing in the pulpit and another out of it." She was at my horse's shoulder with a bound, as if Spry, her pony, had been of one mind and one piece with her. She was afraid she had offended me. She looked up into mine with as anxious a face as ever I saw upon Wynnie. "O, thank you, papa!" she said when I smiled. "I thought I had been rude. I didn't mean it, indeed I didn't. But I do wish you would make it a little plainer to me. I do think about things sometimes, though you would hardly believe it." "What do you want made plainer, my child?" I asked. "When we're to think, and when we're not to think," she answered. I remember all of this conversation because of what came so soon after. "If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day," I answered, "if it cannot be done right except you think about it and lay your plans for it, then that thought is to-day's business, not to-morrow's." "Dear papa, some of your explanations are more difficult than the things themselves. May I be as impertinent as I like on my birthday?" she asked suddenly, again looking up in my face. We were walking now, and she had a hold of my horse's mane, so as to keep her pony close up. "Yes, my dear, as impertinent as you like--not an atom more, mind." "Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've forgotten every word you said about it." "Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it." "I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible," she returned. "If they can," I rejoined. "But last Sunday, for instance, I did not expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except your mamma and Thomas Weir." "How funny! What part of it was that?" "O! I'm not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to you, in consequence, very commonplace." "In consequence of what?" "In consequence of your thinking you understood it." "O, papa dear! you're getting worse and worse. It's not often I ask you anything--and on my birthday too! It is really too bad of you to bewilder my poor little brains in this way."