The little girl was five years old; she was playing in the room near her mother; children must have something to do, but the mother was nervous, because she had been going into gaiety and flirting beyond measure. "Don't rock the horse; it makes mamma's head ache." The little one took the cat, and pinched it, so that it mewed. "Don't do that, child; mamma is ill." The child was good, and did not wish to be troublesome. She sat down at the table, and was silent in order not to irritate mamma. But a child's little body cannot be still; nor ought it indeed; it moves of itself. Probably the child must have been singing a song to itself, for the little unruly feet beat time against the legs of the chair. The mother started up, "Go to Ellen in the kitchen, disobedient child!" The child was not disobedient; doubly wounded in her little heart, she went into the kitchen, good and obedient. But immediately afterwards she reappeared in the doorway, "Ellen was washing up." There stood the child on the threshold, turned out and repulsed from both sides, and could not go anywhere. She looked like a despairing child, tearless, but with all the terror of the lonely in her face. Dumb, turned to stone, as though in the whole world there were no place for her, as though no one would have her, and she knew not why. At this moment she really stood on the threshold of life, for she suddenly brightened up, and approached the open window, which was high above the ground. To the honour of the mother, I must confess that she has described this scene to me with the greatest remorse; it ended by her springing up, taking the child in her arms, and playing with her till the sun went down. "If anything had happened to the child, I should have lived in a hell of self-reproach! And now I think; for every moment which I had not devoted to my child, for every little joy which I had denied her, I would, if it had departed, weep my soul out of my body; I would plunge into space and seek the child under the stars in order to beg her forgiveness, if I could be forgiven...." To think of it! At five years old, on the threshold of life! =Goethe on Christianity and Science.=--As I waded in Professor Delitzsch's dung-heap,[1] I reached at last his third lecture. In the last lines of the last page I found a pearl, which I will set, in order to show it to those who misuse poor Goethe's name for their heathenish propaganda. In a conversation with Eckermann, on March 11, 1832, that is, eleven days before his death, Goethe spoke these ever memorable words: "Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as it shines in the Gospel."