Page:Varia.djvu/104

The painful precocity of children anent matters profane and spiritual is insisted upon so perseveringly by writers of Sunday-school literature that Mrs. Sherwood's infancy appears to have been the recognized model for them all. In one of these stories, which claims to be the veracious history of a very young child, compared with whom, however, the "fairy babes of tombs and graves" are soberly natural and realistic, I found I was expected to believe that an infant a year old loved to hear her father read the Bible, and would lie in her cot with clasped hands, listening to the precious words. Though she could say but little,—at twelve months,—yet when she saw her parents sitting down to breakfast without either prayers or reading, she would put out her hands, and cry "No, no!" and look wistfully at the Bible on the shelf. When two years old, "she was never weary at church," nor at Sunday-school, where she sat gazing rapturously in her teacher's face. It is unnecessary for any one familiar with such tales to be assured that as soon as she could speak plainly she went about correcting, not only all the children in the neighborhood, but all the adults