hough it's a tumble-down one.
Nobody has preached in it for years. But Squire Moyle may do
something now. He's a rich man."

"Is that the old gentleman who came to ask father about his soul?"

"Yes; he says no preaching ever did him so much good as your
father's. That's why he came and offered the living."

"But he can't go to heaven if he's rich."

"I don't know, Taffy, wherever you pick up such wicked thoughts."

"Why, it's in the Bible!"

Humility would not argue about it; but she told her husband that
night what the child had said. "My dear," he answered, "the boy must
think of these things."

"But he ought not to be talking disrespectfully," contended she.

One Tuesday, towards the end of September, Taffy saw his father off
by Joby's van; and the Friday after, walked down with his mother to
meet him on his return. Almost at once the household began to pack.
The packing went on for a week, in the midst of which his father
departed again, a waggon-load of books and furniture having been sent
forward on the road that same morning. Then followed a day or two
during which Taffy and his mother took their meals at the
window-seat, sitting on corded boxes; and an evening when he went out
to the cannon in the square, and around the little back garden,
saying good-bye to the fixtures and the few odds and ends which were
to be left behind--the tool-shed (Crusoe's hut, Cave of Adullam, and
Treasury of the Forty Thieves), the stunted sycamore-tree which he
had climbed at different times as Zacchaeus, Ali Baba, and Man Friday
with the bear behind him; the clothes' prop, which, on the strength
of its forked tail, had so often played Dragon to his St. George.
When he returned to the empty house, he found his mother in the
passage. She had been for a walk alone. The candle was lit, and he
saw she had been crying. This told him where she had been; for,
although he remembered nothing about it, he knew he had once
possessed a small sister, who lived with him less than two months.
He had, as a rule, very definite notions of death and the grave; but
he never thought of her as dead and buried, partly because his mother
would never allow him to go with her to the cemetery, and partly
because of a picture in a certain book of his, called _Child's Play_.
It represented a little girl wading across a pool among water-lilies.
She wore a white nightdress, kilted above her knees, and a dark
cloak, which dragged behind in the