“I never respect a man or woman,” said Spalding, “whose heart does not warm towards little children, who takes no pleasure nor interest in their society, who has no patience to listen to their simple thoughts expressed in their simple way.  ‘Mother,’ said a little child of four or five years of age, one evening when the summer air was warm, and the skies were bright above, as she sat beside her mother, on a bench beneath the spreading branches of the tall old elms in front of the house; ’mother, what makes the stars come out, only after the dark has come down, and why don’t the moon go up into the sky like the sun in the day time?’ I listened anxiously for the reply.  I knew the kind heart of that mother, how truthful it was, and how earnest and pure in its affection for its gentle and only darling.  ’Sit here upon my lap, Mary,’ said the mother, ’and I will try and explain it all so that you will understand it.’  And she told the little child how God made the sun to rule the day, and the moon and the stars to rule the night; how that the stars were always in the sky, but how the superior brightness of the sun put them out in the day time; how the stars, that twinkled like little rush-lights in the heavens, were great worlds, a thousand times larger than this earth, made and placed away up in the sky, by the same great and good God who made the world we live in.  Little Mary was silent and attentive to the simple lecture, until it was finished, and then asked, so simply and confidingly, that I could not help smiling to think that the mind of childhood should be running upon a subject, and seeking a solution of the same question which has puzzled the profoundest philosophers through all time:  ‘Mother,’ said the little one, ’are there people in the moon and in the stars, them great worlds that look to us so like candles in the sky?’ ’That question, my child,’ said the mother, ‘I cannot answer.’  ‘I believe,’ said the child, that there are people in the moon, and in all the stars.’  ‘Why?’ asked her mother.  ’Because I don’t believe God would make such big and beautiful worlds without making people to live in them.’  What more has the profoundest philosopher who ever lived said, to prove that those mighty worlds which are seen in the heavens at night, that are scattered all through the universe of God, rolling forever on their everlasting rounds, are peopled by living, moving, sentient beings?”

CHAPTER XI.

A CONVENTION BROKEN UP IN A BOW—­THE CHAIRMAN EJECTED.

We sent forward our boatman with the luggage early in the morning, up Bog River towards Mud Lake, the source of the right branch of that river, lying some thirty miles deeper in the wilderness, counting the sinuosities of the stream, and said to be the highest body of water in all this wild region.  We were to spend the day on Tupper’s Lake, and follow him the next morning.  Our boatman built for our