DOROTHY was really a very good little girl. Her smile was a joy to see, and when she was happy and smiled at you, her eyes seemed to do the smiling. Her mother and father loved her very much, and were sad because she had no little brother or sister to keep her company or to play with her in the big sunny back yard. They had given her a dear little puppy for Christmas, and oh, how Dorothy loved him,—he was so soft and fluffy and was always so happy when she played with him. But he could not talk to her, and she got so lonely for some one to talk to who would understand the things she said. Mother and Daddy talked to her sometimes; but they mostly talked about things that she could not understand.

When she was twelve years of age, she had developed the habit of thinking cross thoughts, and so of course, she began to seem cross to all the people about her. Her sunny smile was not seen so often, and her mother and daddy were very sorry, for they missed that smile of hers very much.

But do you know, one day a very wonderful thing happened? Dorothy had been thinking about names of people, and she wondered how people got their names, and why they had that name instead of some other one.

Then she thought that maybe God told people what to name their children and that maybe everyone had his or her name for a very special reason. She decided to find out what her name meant, and then perhaps she could find out why God had told her mother to name her Dorothy. So she got the dictionary from the bookcase and looked in it and asked until she found the word Dorothy. She read what it said. What do you suppose it was? It said, “Dorothy (Gr.) The Gift of God.” She looked to see what the “(Gr.)” meant and found that it meant Greek, so of course, she knew that the word Dorothy was a Greek word meaning “The Gift of God.”