ther step._"

"Why, Annie," answered her mother, "I thought your walk was pleasant,
and not tiring at all."

"It was such a long one," said Annie; "_I thought we should never have
got home again._ I would not walk it again _for all the world_."

"But did you not enjoy the walk in the fields, Annie?"

"Oh, no; there were so many cows that _I was frightened to death_."

"What a little angel our baby is," said Nancy, one day to her sister,
"_I feel as though I could eat it up._"

"O what a _monstrous brute_ our governess is!" said Marian to a
school-fellow one afternoon, because she had corrected her rather
sharply for some misdemeanour.

"I say, Fred, we have strawberries in our garden _as big as my fist_,"
said David one day to him.

Fred opened his eyes in wonder, and said, "I should like to see them."

Fred went to see them, and David's garden strawberries were found to be
no larger than one of his ordinary-sized marbles.

"Come," says James to Harry, "let us go and get some blackberries; there
are _oceans_ of them on yonder hedge."

"Oceans!" said James in wonder.

"Yes, oceans; only you must mind in getting them that you don't fall
into the ditch, or you will be _over your head_ in mud."

James went with Harry, and found that the blackberries were as sparse on
the hedge as plums in his school pudding, and as for mud to cover him,
he saw scarcely enough to come over his boots.

Another boy says, "I am so thirsty, I could drink the _sea dry_."
Another, "I learned my lessons to-day in _no time_." Another, standing
in the cold, says, "I am _frozen to death_." Another, in the heat, says,
"I am _as hot as fire_." "My father's horse is _the best in the
kingdom_," says John. "My father's is _the best in the world_," says
Alexander in reply. "Oh, how it did hail in our parts yesterday," said a
boy to his schoolmate; "the hail-stones were as _big as hens' eggs_."
"That's nothing," said his rival in return; "in our parts it rained
_hens and chickens_." "Well," said the other, despairing of going beyond
that, "that was wonderful; I never heard of it raining like that
before."

The above kind of talk may by some be regarded as only "inoffensive
ebullitions" of childhood and youth. It is not said that moral guilt may
be its immediate consequence; but is it a kind of talk altogether
innocent? Does it sound truthful? Is it a habit to be encouraged or
connived at? Should not all who have the education and training o