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of a story there that described her' about makin' broad prayers and long faces while their hearts are far off; pray like a hypocrite, and fret like a scold?"

"Don't go to raking that up, let it be dead and buried. I don't like to think of it."

"You don't get rid o' me that way. What's all your thinkin' goin' to amount to if you can't answer a simple question? Now I know which I should rather do. I'd rather take my chance of gettin' to heaven through a bright sunshiny track right straight ahead than to go up a dark lane full of sour faces and wry tempers, the scapegoat of a multitude of sins."

"You talk as if every body was of that class because you happen to know of one."

"Happen to know of one! I could name a hundred. There's Mrs. Greenwood, a very saint as the world goes, snappin' at every innocent frolic a child has, and wantin' to harness a cross on to 'em as soon as they can run alone, so as to save 'cm from purgatory I 'spose, but I'd go there first."

"Well, I know she doesn't understand children's nature at all, and so far as that goes, very few people do. They seem to forget that they have been children, whose wants and wills should be regarded as much as grown people's. I do not believe there is a class wronged more than they are."

"Now you begin to talk sense. But when you go to smoothin' over everything that's done under long-faced professions you don't do right, Milly."

"I don't try to smooth it over. You go into such extravagant phrases it is of no use to try to talk or