ring their own little wooden
box as well as the vast majority of their own audience, including a wife,
a sister, and a convert in spectacles--men who, in a mild tone of voice,
earnestly strive to paint as a real story the fable of Jonah and the
Whale to a few casual passers-by--those same passers-by who, because
there is no real "fun" to be got out of such lecturers, pass by with such
unsympathetic rapidity. Yet I always love to listen to these speakers.
They are such an illustration of "a voice crying in the wilderness," and
they are so dead-in earnest, and they mean so well--two direct
invitations, as it were, to the world's ridicule. You can't help
admiring them, although mingled with your admiration there is a strong
streak of pity. The simplicity of their faith is colossal. They believe
_everything_. They believe in the miraculous conversion of drunkards in
a single night through one verse of the Gospel; they believe that we
shall all rise again and sing on and on eternally; they believe that all
men and women are born to evil, and they would feel positively indignant
were not the whitest soul among us really steeped in double-dyed sin.
And how they believe in God!--Oh, yes, how they do believe in God! I
cannot say whether they bring God into their daily lives, but they
certainly drag Him to the Marble Arch. And all the while a very sedate,
middle-aged woman and a grim bespectacled maiden of forty-five try their
utmost--or seem so to do--to look as if they had led lives of the most
scarlet sinfulness until they had heard their elderly friend preach The
Word. Nothing ever disturbs these meetings. They just go on to their
appointed close, when the "stand" is promptly taken by someone who
believes in nothing at all, God least of all, and will tell you the
reasons of his disbelief for hours and hours, and still leave you
unconvinced.

_If Age only Practised what it Preached!_

The Boy Scouts have, I believe, a moral injunction to do at least one
good action every day. Older people applaud that injunction wildly. It
is so admirable--_for Boy Scouts_. They consider it to be so admirable,
indeed, that they declare it should form part of the moral curriculum of
every young boy and girl. In fact, they declare it to be applicable to
everyone--everyone except themselves. Personally, I think it would be
even more admirable when followed by grown-up people. But most grown-up
people seem to consider that th