It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, but how much stranger to find the New Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an American butterfly.
I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most beautiful actress in the world.
There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of crushing out the joy of life.
My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into silence and good behaviour.
So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you bore as courageously as you could.
So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice against the Bible.