"Thank God!"

Opening my eyes again with a great effort and looking up I beheld him,
the old, burly country doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers
on my wrist. But now a great emergency confronted me. My guardian
angel, who has never ceased to be very high-church, urged me to meet it.

"William, William," I whispered, and felt his kiss answer me, "he must
be baptized!"

"But he is dead, my darling!" he replied.

"Not really dead, William; he must be alive somewhere or I cannot bear
it, and I cannot have him going where he will be, unbaptized."

So it was done, the doctor, the old woman and William standing around
the little bier, and William saying the holy words himself. And there,
high up on the mountain under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in
his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little
itinerant, with his dust properly baptized, when they come on the last
day to awaken and gather up those very least babies who died so soon
they will not understand the resurrection call when they hear it.

After that we took more interest in the children. They seemed real to
us and nearer, whereas, before, they had simply passed in and out
before us like little irresponsible figureheads of the future, with
whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it
was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when
invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it was
curious, the way the innocent little things invariably hived there, no
matter how awful and accusing the invitation would be--to those "dead
in trespasses and sins, who felt themselves lost and undone."

So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided
angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of
William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a
particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that
there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his
mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not,
but they are infallible natural critics.

This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in
dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in
a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of
his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew
nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often