“Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there.”  A teacher in the Sabbath-school!  Actually a teacher.  She had never intended that.  She had no desire to be a hypocrite.  She had no desire to lead astray. Could she write a book that young people ought to bring from the Sabbath-school with them, and have it say nothing about Christ and heaven and the Christian life?  Surely she could not be a teacher without teaching of these things. Must she teach them incidentally?  Was saying nothing about them speaking against them?  Dr. Walden more than intimated this.

“After all,” she said, speaking to Ruth as the address closed, “I don’t think I shall commence my book yet.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because I am sacred.”  Then, impatiently, after a moment’s silence, during which they changed their seats, “I’m disgusted with Chautauqua!  It is going to spoil me.  I feel my ambition oozing out at the ends of my toes, instead of my fingers as I had designed.  Everybody is so awfully solemn, and has so much to say about eternity, it seems we can’t whisper to each other without starting something that doesn’t even end in eternity.  But, wasn’t he logical and eloquent?”

“I don’t know,” Ruth said, absently.  And she wondered if Marion knew how true her words were.  Ruth had heard scarcely a word of Dr. Walden’s address since that last whisper, “So you are destined to immortality, remember.”  Words spoken in jest, and yet thrilling her through and through with a solemn meaning.  She had always known and always believed this.  She was no skeptic, yet her heart had never taken it in, with a great throb of anxiety, as it did at that moment. Was she being led of the Spirit of God?

The two merely changed their positions and looked about them a little, and then prepared to give attention to the next entertainment, which was a story from Emily Huntington Miller.  Marion was the only one who was in the least familiar with her, she being the only one who had felt that absorbing interest in juvenile literature that had led her to keep pace with the times.

“I’m disposed to listen to her with all due respect and attention,” she said, as she rearranged herself and got out her note-book.  “She is one of the few people who seem not to have bidden a solemn farewell to their common sense when they set out to entertain the children.  I have read everything she ever wrote, and liked it, too.  I set out to make an idol of her in my more juvenile days.  I used to think that the height of my ambition would be attained if I could have a long look at her.  I’m going to try it to-day, and see if it satisfies me; though we are such aspiring and unsatisfied creatures that I strongly suspect I shall go on reaching out for something else even after this experience.”