BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 37

talking with Him as freely as one might talk with a father
or mother, a brother or a friend. The Lord God walked
and talked with them in the garden in the cool of the day.

To return to this glorious fellowship with God, would
indeed be Paradise regained!

But that Paradise eastward in Eden, where God caused
every tree to grow that was good for food and pleasant to
the sight, and where he walked with his children in the cool
of the dewy, balmy evenings, lacked something! Even Para-
dise was not perfect. ;

Can anybody tell what was lacking in the Garden of
Eden?

Think a little. Fruit and flowers, broad rivers and
mossy dells; birds and beasts, and a thousand living things.
What was lacking?

There were no children there! No boys making Eden
echo with their play; no girls filling the glades of Paradise
with merriment and music.

Who would care to live in a world where there were
no children? When the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with the
shrill notes of his mystic pipe drew all the children after
him through the mountain-side, he left Hamelin a poor, dull,
miserable city. So any city, any home, is dull where there
are no children.

Some years ago the writer of this book spent a little
time visiting the penitentiary at Joliet, Ill. Anxious to know
the condition of mind of the less depraved among the con-
victs, he asked a few questions of one of the prisoners who
had been accustomed to the refinements of life before his sin
and folly had landed him in a State prison.

“What do you suffer most from in this sad place?” was
one of the questions asked.