The Word; Walks from Eden, by the Author of 'The Wide, Wide World' Walks from Eden, by the Author of 'The Wide, Wide World'. (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Sept. 5.?THE PROMISE. " I See yon are full of questions, Tiny," said uncle Sam over his first cup of tea in the woods next day. " What is it 1 " " The first thing," said I, " I want to know what became of the garden of Eden ? " How the boys laughed at me. But uncle Sam told them there was nothing to laugh about; that philosophers and learned men had speculated upon questions no wiser. "I was thinking," said Liph, "that people ought to have known where it was. Adam and Eve knew; and I should not think anybody would ever have forgotten." " So you have speculated too 1" said my uncle. " I think it is likely it was destroyed, so that even Adam and Eve could not have told where it was. Some convulsion of nature might have done it. A few years ago, in quiet England, such a thing happened, without a convulsion of nature. A great dam burst; and a flood of water with an avalanche of stones and gravel swept down a valley. It cleaned out the villages and the trees and the fences and filled everything with rubbish. Hundreds of people were killed; and when some who had escaped came back to look for their old homes, they could not find them; everything was so changed there was no telling where they had been." "So if anything like that happened in Eden," I said, " the flaming sword would not have been wanted very long. Uncle Sam, if Adam and Eve understood so little what the curse meant, how could they have had the comfort of the promise 1 Maybe they did not understand that." " Not fully, Tiny. Liph, you need not laugh at Tiny; it is a sensible question. Tiny, I '11 tell you why I think they took some comfort of that promise. Because in all parts ofthe world people kept traces of it, even after they had forgotten what they once knew about the true God; so I think Adam and...