s garb.

Alas! for the baneful belief that years bring wisdom. How pitiable,
and how cruelly detrimental to the child are an ignorant parent's
assumptions of superiority! How tremendous the responsibility that now
lay at his own door! Yet no greater than that which lies at the door
of every parent throughout the world.

It is sadly true, he reflected, that children are educated almost
entirely along material lines. Even in the imparting of religious
instruction, the spiritual is so tainted with materialism, and its
concomitants of fear and limitation, that the preponderance of faith
is always on the material side. Jose had believed that as he had grown
older in years he had lost faith. Far from it! The quantity of his
faith remained fixed; but the quality had changed, through education,
from faith in good to faith in evil. And though trained as a priest of
God, in reality he had been taught wholly to distrust spiritual
power.

But how could a parent rely on spiritual power to save a child about
to fall into the fire? Must not children be warned, and taught to
protect themselves from accident and disaster, as far as may be?
True--yet, what causes accident and disaster? Has the parent's thought
aught to do with it? Has the world's thought? Can it be traced to the
universal acceptance of evil as a power, real and operative? Does
mankind's woeful lack of faith in good manifest itself in accident,
sickness, and death?

A cry roused Jose from his revery. It came from back of the house.
Hastening to the rear door he saw Dona Maria standing petrified,
looking in wide-eyed horror toward the lake. Jose followed her gaze,
and his blood froze. Carmen had been sent to meet the canoe that daily
supplied fresh water to the village from the Juncal river, which
flowed into the lake at the far north end. It had not yet arrived, and
she had sat down beside her jar at the water's edge, and was lost in
dreams as she looked out over the shimmering expanse. A huge crocodile
which had been lying in the shadow of a shale ledge had marked the
child, and was steadily creeping up behind her. The reptile was but a
few feet from her when Dona Maria, wondering at her delay, had gone to
the rear door and witnessed her peril.

In a flash Jose recalled the tale related to him but a few days before
by Fidel Avila, who was working in the church.

"Padre," Fidel had said, "as soon as the church is ready I shall
offer a candle to good _Santa Catalin