“To make sweet music?”

“Yes.”

“Dey wear white dess?” “Yes.”

“Do dey button up behind like Elsie’s dress?”

Violet laughed at that question.  “She is very desirous to have her dresses fasten in front like mamma’s,” she explained in reply to her mother’s look of surprised inquiry.

“Do dey, g’amma? do dey button up in de back?”

“I don’t know how they are made, dearie,” her grandma answered.  “I never was there to see them.”

“Elsie’s never dere.”

“No, people don’t go there till they die.”

“Elsie’s never dere ‘cept when Elsie’s gettin’ made.  Wasn’t Elsie dere den? didn’t Dod make Elsie up in heaven?”

“No, darling, you were never there, but if you love Jesus he will take you there some day.”

“Mamma, how nicely you answer or parry her questions,” said Violet.  “As her father says, she can ask some that a very wise man could not answer.”

“Yes, she has an inquiring mind, and I would not discourage her desire to learn by asking questions,” Grandma Elsie said, adding with a smile, “I can remember that her mother used to ask me some very puzzling ones twenty years ago.”

“And I never received a rebuff, but was always answered to the best of your ability, dear mamma.  I think of that now when tempted to impatience with my little girl’s sometimes wearisome questioning, and resolve to try to be as good a mother to her as you were to me; and still are,” she added with a loving smile.  “And now that she has gone back to her play and baby Ned is sleeping, I want a quiet chat with you.”

“Then let us go to your boudoir and have it,” her mother answered, rising and moving toward the door.

“Mamma, I have not heretofore been timid about burglars,” Violet said, when they were seated in the boudoir, each busied with a bit of needlework, “but I fear that I shall be in future; for only think, mamma, how near they were to my husband and myself while we lay sleeping soundly in our own room!  How easily they might have murdered us both before we were even aware of their presence in the house.”

“Could they? had you then no wakeful guardian at hand?”

“O mamma, yes!  ’Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,’ and ‘He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep’; and yet—­haven’t even Christians sometimes been murdered by burglars?”

“I can not assert that they have not,” replied her mother. “’According to your faith be it unto you,’ and even true Christians are sometimes lacking in faith—­putting their trust in their own defences, or some earthly helper, instead of the Keeper of Israel; or they are fearful and doubtful, refusing to take God at his word and rest in his protecting care.

“I do not see that we have anything to do with the question you propounded just now; we have only to take God’s promises, believe them fully and be without carefulness in regard to that, as well as other things.  I am perfectly sure he will suffer no real evil to befall any who thus trust in him.