"The seven children--Amy, Norman, Ernest, Eva, Ethel, Walter, and Alfred--were called daily to family prayers by the sound of a bell. Probably the servants also were required to attend. Amy remembered the sound of her father's voice reading the Scripture, a 'solemn sound, like the rise and fall of the waves on the shore.' Her ear was trained in this way, from those earliest years when a child's powers of memorization by hearing are nearly miraculous. For the rest of her life the majestic cadences of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible shaped her thinking and every phrase she wrote. A child, even when apparently distracted, learns far more than adults dream he can. Amy did not by any means always attend perfectly to the reading. Once she found a mouse drowning in a pail of water just at the moment when the prayer bell rang. She fished it out, hid it in her pinafore, took her place at prayers, and hoped it would not squeak. It did."
~ From A Chance to Die (The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael), by Elisabeth Elliot
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