THE SIMPLE CHILD.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXV, Issue 1802, 19 December 1912, Page 3

THE SIMPLE CHILD.

SOME PRETTY INCIDENTS

All child stories about heaven are not pretty. In a magazine article on "The mind of a little child," the writer mentions a small girl who was overheard talking religiously to a fly which had settled on her hand. "Little tly,'"she said," do you know all about heaven? Would you like to go to heaven when you die? Then go!" and bang came the other hand on the unfortunate insect, which had heard its lirst. and last sermon. There was a small boy also who had an experimental mind. When a horse fly settled ou the side of his bath, he drew his mother's attention with the remark, "It must be funny to be a fly." "Why particularly funny?" asked his mother. "Weil, you never know how long you'll be a fly at all. One minute you are crawling along the edge of the bath and then' '—with a deadly sweep of his hand—"bang! and you're done for." Much the same talent for the unexpected ending had the little girl who, from baby jealousy, had acquired the habit of kicking her aunt's favourite kitten, the prettiest in a family of three. After i solemn rebukes, she had promised | amendment, and next day, passing | the object of her jealousy by, she proclaimed, in conscious virtue, "I won't kick Auntie's darling little kitten—l'll kick another one!" as she sent his fluffy brother flying across the yard. Children seldom differentiate between the secular and the sacred. "The child mind is a chaotic jumble out of which emerge the common things and the sacred things in disorderly procession." A child is given a toy balloon. "Come along!" she says to a playmate, "and we'll fly our balloon right up to the sky,and God will put his head out of a cloud and pat it,'' And another child enjoys a windy walk, because, "Oh, mother, musn't God laugh when he makes us hold our hats on, going round the corners!" Hynms have a special knack of ringing out originality, or of laying pitfalls in childhood's way. "God make my life a little light Within the world to glow,"

beginSjthe hymn which makes the child aspire by turns to be "a little flower," "a little staff," "a little song." But one summer evening, a small singer added her own petition, "God make my life a little strawberry." A Sunday school teacher was much shocked when one of her scholars sadly mentioned that the infant Samuel was a thief. "It says so in the hymn. He stole a watch." So had child genius very pardonably misconstrued those familiar lines, "The old man, meek and mild,

The priest of Israel slept; His watch the temple child The little Levite kept.''