"No, Mr. Kitely," said the child, "but I feel that lonely! I wish you would read to me a bit, for Mr. Spelt ain't there, and I read something in the Bible this morning that ain't done me no good."
"You shouldn't read such things, Mattie," said the bookseller. "They ain't no good. I'll go and get a candle. Sit you there till I come back."
"No, no, father. Don't leave me here. I don't like the books to-night. Take me with you. Carry me."
The father obeyed at once, took his child on his arm, got a candle from the back room, for the place was very dusky—he did not care to light the gas this time of the year—and sat down with Mattie in a part of the shop which was screened from the door, where he could yet hear every footstep that passed.
"What shall I read now, my precious?" he asked.
"Well, I don't think I care for anything but the New Testament to-night, father."
"Why, you've just been saying it disagreed with you this very morning," objected Mr. Kitely.
"No, father. It wasn't the New Testament at all. It was the very old Testament, I believe; for it was near the beginning of it, and told all about a horrid murder. I do believe," she added, reflectively, "that that book grows better as it gets older—younger, I mean."
The poor child wanted some one to help her out of her Bible difficulties, and her father certainly was not the man to do so, for he believed nothing about or in it. Like many other children far more carefully taught of man, she was laboring under the misery of the fancy that everything related in the Old Testament without remark of disapprobation is sanctioned by the divine will. If parents do not encourage their children to speak their minds about what they read generally, and especially in the Bible, they will one day be dismayed to find that they have not merely the strangest but the most deadly notions of what is contained in that book—as, for instance, besides the one in hand, that God approved of all the sly tricks of Jacob—for was not he the religious one of the brothers, and did not all his tricks succeed? They are not able without help to regard the history broadly, and see that just because of this bad that was in him, he had to pass through a life of varied and severe suffering, punished in the vices which his children inherited from himself, in order that the noble part of his nature might be burned clean of the filth that clung to it.
Such was Mr. Kitely's tenderness over his daughter, increased by some signs he had begun to see of the return of an affection of the brain from which he had been on the point of losing her some years before, that he made no further opposition, but, rising again, brought an old "breeches Bible" from a shelf, and, taking her once more on his knee, supported her with one hand and held the book with the other.