“It was out of the shepherd life of my country,” he remarked, “that there came long ago that sweetest spiritual song ever written — the Twenty-third Psalm.”
After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed he turned to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said: “Ah, so many things familiar to us are strange to you of America.”
“Yes,” I answered, “and no doubt because of this we often make mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your modern names.”
He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said: “So many things in the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have been woven into the words of the Bible and into the conceptions of religious ideas as expressed there; you of the Western world, not knowing these things as they are, often misunderstand what is written, or at least fail to get a correct impression from it.”
“Tell us about some of these,” I ventured, with a parental glance at two listening little faces.