"Why don't you tell me?" he asked, laying a detaining hand on the leaf; "I want to know all about it. What is that great hole? and why is the man all sewed up in white?"
Jane, driven into a corner, admitted that the hole was a grave.
"But, lor! master Miles," added she, "you don't know nothing about them things, and if you want to know you must ask your pa!"
"Of course I know people die," said Miles, simply, "because my mamma's dead; so you're quite wrong, Jane, to say I don't understand those sort of things. I know all about it. When people die they are packed up in a box and put into the ground, and then if they've been good, God will come some day and unpack them."
Humphrey had joined the group just in time to hear the end of the explanation, and he met Jane's eye and smile with all the conscious superiority of his three years advance in religious knowledge.
"If mother were here, Miles," he whispered, "she would explain to you much better than that. There was something she used to tell me about our dead body being like a seed, that is, put into the ground, but will turn into a beautiful flower some day. Only I can't remember it quite like she said it," he added, sighing, "I wish I could."
"Oh, Humphie!" said little Miles eagerly, holding up the book, "can you remember what she used to say about this picture?"
But Humphrey taxed his memory in vain. It was all so dim, so confused, he could not remember sufficiently clearly to tell the story, so Jane was called upon to read it.
Now Jane left out her h's, and did not mind her stops, so the beautiful story of the raising of Lazarus must have lost much of its charm; but still the children listened with attention, for those who have nothing better must put up with what they have. Poor little opening minds, depending thus early on the instructions of an ignorant housemaid! forced to forego, in the first budding of youth, those lessons in Divine truth that came so lovingly, and withal so forcibly, from the lips of a tender mother; those lessons which linger on the heart of the full-grown man long after the lips that pronounced them are silenced for ever.