she scribbled again. Ruth had the benefit of many side remarks.

"My!" Marion said, with an accompanying grimace. "What an army of books!
All for Sunday-schools. Three millions given out every Sunday! Does that
seem possible! Brother Hart, I'm afraid you are mistaken. Didn't he say
that was Dr. Hart's estimate, Ruthie? There is certainly a good chance
for mine, if so many are needed every week. I shall have to go right to
work at it. What if I _should_ write one, Ruth, and what if it should
_take_, and all the millions of Sunday-schools want it at once! Just as
likely as not. I am a genius. They never know it until afterward. I
shall certainly put you in, Ruthie, in some form. So you are destined to
immortality, remember."

"I wish you wouldn't whisper so much," whispered back Ruth. "People are
looking at us in an annoyed way. What is the matter with you, Marion? I
never knew you to run on in such an absurd way. That is bad enough for
Eurie!"

"I'm developing," whispered Marion. "It is the 'reflex influence of
Chautauqua' that you hear so much about."

Then she wrote this sentence from Dr. Walden's lips:

"Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a
teacher in that school as though he had classes there. A good book is a
book that will aid the teacher in his work of bringing souls to Christ.
I have known the earnest teaching of months to be defeated by one
single volume of the wrong kind being placed in the hands of the
scholar."

Suddenly Marion sat upright, slipped her pencil and note-book into her
pocket, and wrote no more. A sentence in that address had struck home.
This determination to enter the lists as a writer was not all talk. She
had long ago decided to turn her talents in that direction as the
easiest thing in the line of literature, whither her taste ran. She had
read many of the standard Sunday-school books; read them with amused
eyes and curling lips, and felt entirely conscious that she could match
them in intellectual power and interest, and do nothing remarkable then.
But there rang before her this sentence:

"Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a
teacher in that school as though he had classes there." A teacher in the
Sabbath-school! Actually a _teacher_. She had never intended that. She
had no desire to be a hypocrite. She had no desire to lead astray.
_Could_ she write a book that young people ought to bring from the
Sabbath-school with them, a