from the Holy Land. I
have had it for a long time, and it has hung on the frame of a
photograph of Bellini's lovely Madonna. This little girl has always
liked that picture, and she has often spoken to me about it. But she had
never mentioned the rosary, which not only is made of dark wood, but is
darker still with its centuries of age. One day after the rosary of pink
coral and bright silver had been given her she came to see me. Passing
through the room where the Madonna is, she stopped to look at it. At
once she exclaimed, "_You_ have a rosary!"

"Yes," I said; "it came from the Holy Land." I took it down, and put it
into her hands. "It has been in Bethlehem," I went on, "and in
Jerusalem. It is very old; it belonged to a saint--like St. Francis, who
was such friends with the birds, you remember."

"I suppose the saint used it to say his prayers with?" the little girl
observed. Then, the question evidently occurring to her for the first
time, she asked, eagerly, "What prayers did he say, do you think?"

When I had in some part replied, I said, this question indeed occurring
to me for the first time, "What prayers do you say?"

"Oh," she replied, instantly, "I say, 'Our Father,' and 'Now I lay me,'
and 'God bless' all the different ones at home, and in other places,
that I know. I say all that; and it takes all the beads. So I say, 'The
Lord is my Shepherd' last, for the cross." She was silent for a moment,
but I said nothing, and she went on. "I know 'In my Father's house are
many mansions,' and 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels.'
I might say them sometimes instead, mightn't I?"

I told this to one of my friends who is a devout Roman Catholic. "It
shows," she said, "what the rosary can do for religion!"

But it seemed to me that it showed rather what religion could do for the
rosary. Had the child's mother, Scotch by birth, New England by
breeding, not been a truly religious woman she would not have bade her
little girl handle with reverence the emblem of a faith so unlike her
own; she would not have said, "Don't play with it." As for the small
girl, had she never learned to "say prayers," she would not have desired
the rosary to say them "with." And it was not the silver cross hanging
on her rosary that influenced her to "say last," for it, the best psalm
and "spiritual song" she knew; it was the understanding she had been
given by careful teaching of the meaning of that symbol. Above all, had