Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1910 — An Old Baptismal Font. [ARTICLE]

An Old Baptismal Font.

Ip the old baptistery *at Florence the baptistery with the wonderful bronze doors which Michelangelo called “so beautiful that they were worthy to be the gates of paradise”—most of the babies ofc. Florence have been baptized for many hundred years. At almost any hour of any day one w«l sand baptismal parties waiting before the. font, with babies of every rank in line, from the princely heir of a great bouse, nearly smothered in costly laces and attended by a small army of friends and relations, to tho little creature decked out in gaudv cotton and held In the arms of a solitary old peasant woman. No register of baptisms was kept la the very early days. The first recqnf was made in this wise: a certain priest took it into hla head to kqgp aocount of children ho baptized. Accordingly he put a white bean into a bog-for every boy and a black bean for everv girl. Latfcr on records were carefully kept and if onh could look them over it would be a fascinating study, for prob ably the greater part of the painters scholars, poets and soldiers who have made Florence famous received their names at the font of “my dear little Saint John”—as Dante ceiled it.