Christianity was increasingly dear to him as the discovery of childhood and the unfolding of its revelations. Into what long disquisitions he delighted to go, estimating the probable value of the idea that all returning to righteousness must be a child's returning. He saw what an influence such a conception has upon the hard and fast lines of habit and destiny to melt them down. He had a still greater estimate of the importance of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth came and lived as a child; and the dream of the last year of his life was to write, in the mood of the Holy-Cross tale, a sketch of the early years of the Little Galilean Peasant-Boy. This vision drifted its light into all his pictures of children at the last. He knew the "Old Adam" in us all, especially as he reappeared in the little folk. "But I don't believe the depravity is total, do you?" he said, "else a child would not care to hear about Mary's Little One;"--and then he would go on, following the Carpenter's Son about the cottage and over the hill, and rejoicing that, in following Him thus, he came back to his own open-eyed childhood, "But, you know," said he, "my childhood was full of the absurdities and strenuosities" (this last was his word) "of my puritan surroundings. Why, I never knew how naturally and easily I can get back into the veins of an old puritan grandfather that one of my grandmothers must have had--and how hard it is for me to behave there, until I read Alice Morse Earle's 'The Sabbath in New England.' I read that book nearly all night, if haply I might subdue the confusion and sorrows that were wrought in me by eating a Christmas pie on that feast-day. The fact is, my immediate ecclesiastical belongings are Episcopalian. I am of the church of Archbishop Laud and King Charles of blessed memory. I like good, thick Christmas pie, 'reeking with sapid juices,' full-ripe and zealous for good or ill. But my 'Separatist' ancestors all mistook gastric difficulties for spiritual graces, and, living in me, they all revolt and want to sail in the Mayflower, or hold town-meetings inside of me after feast-day."

Then, as if he had it in his mind,--poor, pale, yellow-skinned sufferer,-- to attract one to the book he delighted in, he related that he fell asleep with this delicious volume in his hand, and this is part of the dream he sketched afterward: