CHAPTER VIII

SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES

Around the evening lamp that winter the little boys studied Holy Writ, while Allan made summaries of it for the edification of the proud grandfather in far-off Florida.

Tersely was the creation and the fall of man set forth, under promptings and suggestions from Clytie and Cousin Bill J., who was no mean Bible authority:  how God, “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” found his first pair ashamed of their nakedness, and with his own hands made them coats of skins and clothed them.  “What a treasure those garments would be in this evil day,” said Clytie—­“what a silencing rebuke to all heretics!” But the Lord drove out the wicked pair, lest they “take also of the tree of life and live forever,” saying, “Behold, the man is become as one of us!” This provoked a lengthy discussion the very first evening as to whether it meant that there was more than one God.  And Clytie’s view—­that God called himself “Us” in the same sense that kings and editors of newspapers do—­at length prevailed over the polytheistic hypothesis of Cousin Bill J.

On they read to the Deluge, when man became so very bad indeed that God was sorry for ever having made him, and said:  “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and the beast and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

Hereupon Bernal suggested that all the white rabbits at least should have been saved—­thinking of his own two in the warm nest in the barn.  He was unable to see how white rabbits with twitching pink noses and pink rims around their eyes could be an offense, or, indeed, other than a pure joy even to one so good as God.  But he gave in, with new admiration for the ready mind of Cousin Bill J., who pointed out that white rabbits could not have been saved because they were not fish.  He even relished the dry quip that maybe he, the little boy, thought white rabbits were fish; but Cousin Bill J. didn’t, for his part.

Past the Tower of Babel they went, when the Lord “came down to see the city and the tower,” and made them suddenly talk strange tongues to one another so they could not build their tower actually into Heaven.

The little boy thought this a fine joke to play on them, to set them all “jabbering” so.

After that there was a great deal of fighting, and, in the language of Allan’s summary, “God loved all the good people so he gave them lots of wives and cattle and sheep and he let them go out and kill all the other people they wanted to which was their enemies.”  But the little boy found the butcheries rather monotonous.

Occasionally there was something graphic enough to excite, as where the heads of Ahab’s seventy children were put into a basket and exposed in two heaps at the city’s gate; but for the most part it made him sleepy.