nversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with
salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned
with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of
healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.

One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it
gives a tone to the occasion. Its chief meaning is surely that we
remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all
good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming
of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do
better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence
for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and
move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will
seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which
they have perhaps never expressed in words.

The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful
influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the
friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything
to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are
obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be
consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when
they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar
intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and
experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table
with you in childhood meant to you.

The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of
mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be
prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times.
How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the
same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have
thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the
food for the spirit?

Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of
explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to
hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of
life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple
terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever
will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as
though this really