Let us remember the Whispering Gallery of the soul, then, and when we think evil thoughts, even though we never tell them to our nearest friend, let us be sure God knows them.  And when we try hard to be good and to do good, but fail, let us also remember that God sees it, even though none else knows.  Our prayer each morning ought to be like the psalmist’s:  “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

THE HE-SAID GIRL

Sometimes, when I am walking along the street, I catch snatches of conversation as I pass by a group of little girls.  And often I hear the phrase “He said” this, or “He said” that.  There are girls who do not seem to talk about much else but what this boy or that boy has said, and these girls I call “he-said” girls.

Now, of course it is all right for girls to think about the boys.  We could not stop that if we would, and we would not stop it if we could.  The danger comes when a girl thinks of little else.  The girl who begins by devoting all her thought to boys is apt to end by being a very unattractive and unpopular sort of woman.  Every girl ought to get along well with the girls of her own age as well as with the boys.  There is something wrong with the girl who cannot get along with her girl friends.  And so I say to you that if you do not want to be thoroughly unhappy as a woman, try to win the friendship of girls as well as boys.

A good plan for the “he-said” girl is to take her father as her ideal, and hero and lover.  Then, as she grows to womanhood, she will not be satisfied with any man who is not in some measure as good as her father.  In the meanwhile beware of being a “he-said” girl.

ON DECK

When I was a boy I belonged to a baseball team in the village where I lived, and when we played games with a team from another village we had a scorer who not only kept tally of the runs, but also told us who was to be the next at the bat.  He would say, “So-and-so is at the bat, So-and-so is on deck.”  And when he told a boy he was “on deck,” that boy knew he was to be the next one at the bat.

Boys and girls are always on deck, whether they are playing ball or not, for a boy or girl never knows when he is going to be called upon to play some part in the game called Life.  And the strange thing about it is, there is no scorer who tells you that you are on deck.  So you never get any warning, and you may be on deck and not know it, and so miss your chance.

Samuel, for instance, was a boy who used to close the curtains and put out the candles at night in the temple away back hundreds of years before Christ was born.  One evening he had put out the lights and closed the curtains, just the same as he had a hundred times before, and then lay down to sleep.  He little thought that this particular day he was on deck, and was to be called into the game by God.  But that night God called him, and sent him on a very important errand that was to change his whole life and the history of his people.