his time she reached a rest for her feet. For a week, her mother
had not been able to go to the nursery, evenings, at the child's prayer
hour. She spoke of it--was sorry for it, and said she would come
to-night, and hoped she could continue to come every night and hear Susy
pray, as before. Noticing that the child wished to respond, but was
evidently troubled as to how to word her answer, she asked what the
difficulty was. Susy explained that Miss Foote (the governess) had been
teaching her about the Indians and their religious beliefs, whereby it
appeared that they had not only a God, but several. This had set Susy to
thinking. As a result of this thinking, she had stopped praying. She
qualified this statement--that is, she modified it--saying she did not
now pray "in the same way" as she had formerly done. Her mother said:

"Tell me about it, dear."

"Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were
wrong. By and by, it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray
that there may be a God and a Heaven--or something better."

I wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time,
in a record which we kept of the children's sayings, and my reverence
for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since
then. Its untaught grace and simplicity are a child's, but the wisdom
and the pathos of it are of all the ages that have come and gone since
the race of man has lived, and longed, and hoped, and feared, and
doubted.

To go back a year--Susy aged seven. Several times her mother said to
her:

"There, there, Susy, you mustn't cry over little things."

This furnished Susy a text for thought She had been breaking her heart
over what had seemed vast disasters--a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by
thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and
friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat--and now came this
strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason, these were not vast
calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the
rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small
ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem
earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time, for
two or three days--but it baffled her--defeated her. And at last she
gave up and went to her mother for help.

"Mamma, what is '_little_ things'?"

It seemed a simple question--at first. And y