SIMPLES FROM THE MASTER'S GARDEN.
Simples from the Master's Garden. By Annie Trumbull Slosson. (Sunday School Times Company, Philadelphia. 4s. net.)—If the Sunday-school children of Philadelphia and its surroundings get such excellent provision as is to be found in this volume, they are very well off. It contains seven little studies, as they may be called, all, we take it, drawn from life. All are of good quality, but two we may mention as perhaps the best. In "The Changed Cross" we read of a certain Ruth, a sweet child in looks and temper, but troubled with a grievous affliction of almost unin- telligible speech, setting a barrier between her and other girls, and absolutely frightening the young children to whom she was in her heart devoted. Her first comfort came to her from a poem called "The Changed Cross." In this some sufferer is allowed to change her burden for another, and finds the new one much heavier to bear. This was a new light to Ruth. "Did He choose it for me ? " she asked; and the thought that He did changed her as a miracle, giving her, among other things, a brightness which made her attract in spite of the stammering speech. She died young—perhaps it was as well—listening in her last hours to one of her favourite hymns, "There is a Fountain," in which the special charm to her was the couplet, "When this poor lisping, stammering tongue Lies silent in the grave," and with a little silver cross which her teacher had given her under her pillow. The other is "A Simple Expositor," the story of "Benny," a negro who came into the author's service a few years after the Civil War. He was twenty, and an intelligent lad, but the Bible was absolutely new to him. He cared for no other books ; this had an entrancing interest for him, and the characters in it were all vividly real. On the day when he read for the first time of David's victory over Goliath he brought in after dinner—he had shown while waiting various signs of excitement—a frosted cake, garnished with flowers, with a small American flag In the centre. "That's on 'count of the great viet'ry—David's, you know. We wasn't any of us there to celebrate at the time, and I reckoned wo ought to take some notice of it now."
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