I want to tell you how the mammas away up in Lapland keep their babies from disturbing the minister on Sunday.
Poor babies! I suppose it is growing bad style everywhere to take them out to church; and I suppose, too, that the ministers are, privately, as thankful as can be. But the Lapp mammas don't stay at home with theirs. The Lapps are a very religious people. They go immense distances to hear their pastors. Every missionary is sure of a large audience, and an attentive one. He can hear a pin drop—that is, if he choose to drop one himself—the congregation would'nt make so much noise as that under any consideration. All the babies are outside, buried in the snow. As soon as the family arrives at the little wooden church, and the reindeer is secured, the papa Lapp shovels a snug little bed in the snow, and mamma Lapp wraps baby snugly in skins, and deposits it therein. The papa piles the snow around it, and the parents go decorously into the church. Over twenty or thirty babies lie out there in the snow around the church, and I never heard of one that suffocated or froze. Smoke-dried little creatures, I suppose they are tough! But how would our soft, tender, pretty pink and white babies like it, do you think?—Wide Awake.
