A three days’ rain which set in the morning after Johnny’s first appearance as a schoolmaster, put a stop to gardening, and Jim decided for himself that he was not entitled to any more lessons until he had done some more work.
This had not been Tiny’s and Johnny’s idea of the contract at all; they expected Jim to help them whenever they needed help, and intended to keep on regularly with their teaching, unless some very special engagement should prevent them. But, as they remembered when they came to talk it over, they had not made this plain to Jim, and they decided to draw up a contract, and have it ready for his signature, or rather his “mark,” if, as Johnny said rather mournfully, “it should ever clear up again.” They lamented very much not having planted anything before the rain.
“It would be soaking and swelling all the time,” mourned Johnny, “and come bouncing up the minute the sun comes out!”
They tried shooting some radish seed at the beds with Johnny’s pea-shooter, from an upstairs window, and had the pleasure of seeing a flock of hungry sparrows make a breakfast of the seed almost before it had touched the ground. Johnny was indignant, but Tiny said tranquilly,—
“I’m glad I saw that. It was in last Sunday’s lesson, you know, Johnny,—about the fowls of the air devouring it up. When things don’t come up in my head, now, I shall know it was because I didn’t plant them deep enough.”
It was after it had rained for two days and part of another, that they drew up the contract, and thus it ran,—
“We are going to teach James Brady all we know, that he wants to learn, and he is to come every evening, unless we ask him not to, which we shall not do except for something very particular, like a birthday party, or having folks here to tea. And he is going to help us work in our gardens, when we want help, but he is to come all the same in the evening, whether he has helped that day or not.
“Signed,
“Clementine and John Leslie
“James Brady.”
X HIS MARK
They admired this production so much, that they made arrangements for framing it, when Jim should have added, “his mark.” The arrangements consisted chiefly of an old slate-frame, which Tiny painted bright red, using up her entire cake of vermillion to do it, and Johnny was obliged to copy the contract in very large letters, to make it fill the frame.
A day of brilliant sunshine followed the three days’ rain. Johnny passed Jim’s stand on his way from school, reproached Jim for his absence, told him of the contract, and secured his promise to come that evening at a quarter past six, sharp. Tiny carefully practised a little song for which she could herself play the accompaniment, and both the children had their stock of seeds in readiness, before tea.
When Jim appeared, punctually at the appointed time, Mrs. Leslie came out on the porch, and wished him good evening, and she noticed with much pleasure that he had on a clean shirt, and that a fresh patch covered the knee of his trousers, where a gaping rent had been, four days ago. His face and hands shone with scrubbing, and his hair with brushing, and he made the best bow at his command, as he came up the steps.
“You’ll have to come too, mamma,” said Tiny, “for we haven’t quite made up our minds where the things are to go, and we want you to help us.”
“I’ll bring a camp-stool, and a board for your feet, mamma dear,” chimed in Johnny, “and you can ‘sit on a cushion as grand as a queen,’ and watch us work.”
“But I haven’t given papa his second cup of tea yet,” remonstrated Mrs. Leslie, “nor eaten my piece of cake.”
“You can pour out the tea, and then ask papa to please excuse you, and you can bring your cake with you,” said Johnny, coaxingly, and to this Mrs. Leslie consented, although she said something about tyrants. She came out, presently, with two pieces of cake on a plate, and insisted upon Jim’s eating one of them, which he did without the slightest reluctance, and then went vigorously to work. You might have thought a large farm was being planted, if you had heard the earnest discussion, and the number and variety of seeds named, and dusk overtook them before they were half done. It was decided that Tiny’s lesson should be given first, as her bedtime came before Johnny’s did. The little song was quite new to Jim, and he could not join in it as readily as he had joined in the hymn, but Tiny went patiently over it, again and again, until he caught the air, and knew the words of one verse, and she did not stop until they were singing together in perfect harmony.
Then she gave him up to Johnny, and considerately left the room. Johnny brought out the card with a flourish, saying confidently,—
“We’ll just run over the letters again, to make sure, and then we’ll go on to the a-b-abs. Oh, here’s the contract—you just put your mark to it there, where we’ve left a place, and then we’ll frame it and give it to you.”
Jim listened thoughtfully, while Johnny read him the contract, but he made no motion toward affixing his mark to it.
“It don’t seem to me to be fair,” he said, “you’ll not need much work done in those little gardens, and here you’ve promised to teach me nearly every evening; I think I ought only to have a lesson when I’ve done some work.”
“Oh fiddlesticks!” said Johnny, impatiently, “you’ve worked like everything already, and besides, we like to teach you; papa says it’s the very best way to learn things, teaching them to somebody, so you see it’s just as good for us as it is for you. Come, put your mark there, where we left the hole for it,” and Johnny dipped the pen in the inkstand, and handed it to his pupil, who reluctantly made his mark in the “hole.”
“I’ll frame it to-morrow,” said Johnny, “Now for the letters. What’s that?” and he pointed to V.
Jim pondered a moment, then,—
“That’s A,” he said, confidently.
Johnny controlled himself by a violent effort, pointed out the difference between A and V, and then “skipped” Jim through the rest of the alphabet. To his utter consternation, Jim only remembered about half the letters, and of some of these he was not perfectly certain.
“I didn’t think I was such a stupid,” said poor Jim, humbly, “but I suppose that’s because I never tried to learn anything before. I thought I knew half the letters before I began, but the boys must have fooled me—I’m certain somebody told me that was K,” and he pointed to R.
This made Johnny laugh, and Jim’s humility gave him such a comfortable feeling of superiority, that he took courage, and went through the alphabet once more, with tolerable patience. But Jim was too keen-sighted not to notice the effort which Johnny was making, and when the lesson was at last over, he said,—
“It’s going to be more of a job than you thought it would, Johnny; I can see that, and if you want to be off your bargain, I’ve nothing to say.”
But he looked so dull and disappointed, that Johnny’s conscience reproached him with selfishness, and he said cheerfully,—
“Oh, you mustn’t give up the ship so soon, Jim. I’ll stick to it as long as you will, and it will get easier after you’ve once learned the letters. You’d better take your spelling-book home with you to-night, and then to-morrow you can try to pick out the letters whenever you have a little time, you know.”
“I will do that,” said Jim, brightening, “and I’ll not forget this on you, Johnny—you’ll see if I do!”
Johnny went into the parlor, when Jim was gone, and dropped his head on his mother’s shoulder.
“O mamma!” he said, dolefully, “he’d forgotten nearly every single letter, and I could see he hardly believed me, when I told him that R wasn’t K!”
Mrs. Leslie gently pulled Johnny down on her lap.
“You must go out bright and early to-morrow morning, and see if your seeds are up,” she said.
Johnny looked at her in amazement.
“Why, mamma!” he exclaimed, “they’re only just planted! It will be several days before they show the least little nose above ground.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Leslie, but she said nothing more, only looking into Johnny’s eyes with a little smile in hers.
He suddenly clapped his hands, exclaiming,—
“I see what you mean, mamma! I’m sowing seeds in Jim’s head, and expecting to see them come up before they’re fairly planted! But indeed, it’s harder work than digging.”
“‘Fair exchange is no robbery,’” said Mrs. Leslie, laughing at Johnny’s mournful face. And then she said, quite seriously,—
“I will give you another text, dear; one that I thought of when I was watching you plant your seeds this evening. ‘The husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.’ You see, the patience is needed not only before the seeds come up, but while the plants are blossoming, and while the fruit is forming, and while it is ripening. It is not being patient just for a day, or a week, or a month, but for the whole season, for it says ‘the early and latter rain.’ Now a great many of us can have a little—a short patience, but it takes much more grace to have the long patience, and this is what my little boy must strive for.”
“I don’t think I’m naturally patient, mamma,” said Johnny, with a sigh.
“No, I don’t think you are,” replied his mother, “but Tiny is, and her patience will be a great help to you, if you will only let it, just as your courage and energy are a help to her, for she is naturally timid, and a little inclined to be faint-hearted. You have a chance now to win a great victory, and, at the same time, you are running the risk of a great defeat; but you must not try to have patience for the whole thing at once—ask every day for just that day’s patience. You know when it is that we don’t receive; it is when we ‘ask amiss.’ All our fighting for our Great Captain will be in vain, unless we are ‘strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering, with joyfulness.’ We will see, next Sunday, how many times we can find this word ‘patience’ in the Gospels and Epistles; you will be surprised, I think, to find how often it is used.”
“It will be a help to remember, mamma,” said Johnny, with a more hopeful look, “working in the garden, first. And I shall say ‘long patience’ to myself ever so many times, before we begin our lessons.”
So instead of going to bed with the discouraged feeling which the lesson had left, Johnny went with a vigorous determination not to be beaten, and he added to his evening prayer a petition for patience.
“If it hadn’t been for that contract, I wouldn’t have come a step to-night,” said Jim, as they finished planting the gardens, the next evening, “but I thought I would try one more shot, and then, if it’s like last night, you must just let me off, and burn the contract up.”
“Indeed I shall not!” said Johnny, stoutly, “there it is, all framed and glazed, and here I am, and there you are, and you’ll not get off till you know how to read, and then you’ll not wish to!”
We will not follow Johnny through all the discouragements and encouragements which attended his career as a teacher; but you will be glad to hear that, with that help which is always near, he conquered, and that by the time he and Jim were husking the corn which the little gardens had yielded, Jim could read as fluently as his teacher could, and was beginning to write a legible, if somewhat uncertain hand. He had shown a real talent for music, and, having learned all that Tiny could teach him, was joyfully and gratefully taking lessons from Mrs. Leslie.
“And just suppose my patience had turned out to be only the short kind, Tiny!” said Johnny, as Tiny and he, with heads close together, proudly popped the corn from their own farms.
The desk next to Johnny’s had been vacant for a long time, and he did not like this much, for he was a sociable boy, and although of course, no great amount of conversation was permitted during school hours, it is something to be able to make faces to a sympathetic desk-mate. There was not an absolute rule against talking in the school which Johnny attended. The teacher had said, at the beginning of the term,—
“Now, boys, I don’t forbid you to speak to each other during school hours, if you have anything really worth saying on your minds, and will speak so that you will not disturb your neighbors, but all long conversations can be saved till school is out, and I hope you will be honorable enough not to talk foolishly, or to take advantage of this permission. If I find it necessary, I shall resort to a rule, so you have the matter in your own hands.”
It had not been found necessary, so far, although the school was full, excepting that one vacant seat next to Johnny’s.
“It may be a coincidence, you know, Tiny,” said Johnny, one day, when he had been lamenting his lonely lot to his sister, “but I don’t know—I have a kind of a sort of an idea that it isn’t.”
“What is a coincidence, anyhow, Johnny?” inquired Tiny, who was never above asking for information.
“It’s two things happening together, accidentally, that look as if they had been done on purpose,” explained Johnny, with the little air of superior wisdom that he always wore when Tiny asked him a question that he could answer. I am afraid he sometimes hunted up one or two long words, to be worked into his next conversation with Tiny, purely for the purpose of explaining to her! It was so pleasant to see her large eyes raised admiringly to his face.
“But why shouldn’t it be a really and truly coincidence, Johnny?” pursued Tiny.
“Oh well, because Mr. Lennox said one day that he thought Harry Conover and I might be shaken up together, and equally divided, to advantage, and Harry’s the quietest boy I ever knew, so it’s pretty plain what he meant by that. And I’ve noticed how he does with the other boys; he finds out where their weak spots are, and then tries to brace them up there, but while he’s trying, he sort of keeps things out of their way that would be likely to make them slip up, and so I s’pose that is what he is doing to me. But it’s very stupid to be all alone, and I wish another boy would come—then he’d have to use that desk, for it’s the only one that’s left.”
Two or three days after this talk with Tiny, Johnny rushed in from school in a state of great excitement, exclaiming, as he entered the room where his mother and sister were sitting,—
“The seat’s taken, mamma! And it wasn’t a coincidence, Tiny! Mr. Lennox made a little sort of a speech to me, all by myself, after school; he knew this boy was coming, and he saved the seat on purpose for him, and I’m dreadfully afraid he’s a prig! He didn’t act the least bit like a new boy, he just studied and ciphered and wrote as if he’d been going there all his life! And whenever I spoke to him, he just looked at me—so!” and Johnny’s round face assumed an expression of mild and reproachful surprise, which made Tiny laugh, and even made his mother smile, though she shook her head at him at the same time, saying reprovingly,—
“Johnny, Johnny, you know I don’t like you to mimic people, dear!”
“I beg your pardon, mammy darling!” and Johnny poked his rough head into his mother’s lap, “that sort of went off of itself! But indeed, I didn’t talk much to him, and it was about very useful things. He hadn’t any sponge, and I offered him mine, and he was hunting everywhere but in the right place for the Danube river, and I just put my finger on the map, and said, ‘Here it is,’ and he didn’t so much as say ‘thank you!’ And at recess I said, ‘Do you love cookies, Ned?’—his name is Ned Owen—and he said, with a sort of a sniff, ‘I don’t love anything to eat,’ so I thought I’d—I’d see him further before I’d give him one of your cookies, mamma!”
“Now Johnny Leslie,” said his mother, smoothing his hair softly with her nice little cool hands, “you’ve taken a prejudice against that poor boy, and if you don’t stop yourself, you’ll be quarrelling with him before long! Something I read the other day said that, when we find fault with people, and talk against them, there is always envy at the bottom of our dislike. I don’t think it is quite always so, but I do believe it very often is. While you are undressing to-night, I want you to sort yourself out, and put yourself just where you belong.”
Johnny hung his head; he did not have to do a great deal of sorting to find the truth of what his mother had said.
There was a careful completeness about everything the new boy had done, which, to a head-over-heels person, was truly exasperating.
And as days passed on, this feeling grew and strengthened. There was a curious little stiffness and formality about all Ned Owen said and did, which Johnny found very “trying,” and which made him overlook the boy’s really pleasant side; for he had a pleasant side, as every one has, only, unfortunately, we do not always take as much pains to find it as we do to find the unpleasant one.
It seemed to most of the boys that Ned did not mind the fun which was certainly “poked” at him in abundance, but Johnny was very sure that he did. The pale, thin face would flush suddenly, the slender hands would be clinched, either in his pockets, or under cover of his desk. Johnny generally managed to keep himself from joining in the fun, as it was considered by all but the victim, but he did this more to please his mother than because he allowed his conscience to tell him the truth.
Boys are not always so funny and witty as they mean to be and think they are. There was nothing really amusing in calling Ned “Miss Nancy,” and asking him what he put on his hands to whiten them, and yet these remarks, and others of the same lofty character, could raise a laugh at any time.
But deep under Johnny’s contempt for Ned, was the thorn of envy. Before Ned came, Johnny had stood first in just one thing. Twice a week the “Scholar’s Companion” class was required to write “sentences”; that is, each boy must choose a word out of the spelling and defining lesson, and work it into a neatly turned sentence of not less than six, or more than ten lines. Johnny liked this; it seemed to him like playing a game, and he had stood at the head of the class for a long time, for it so happened that no other boy in the class shared his feeling about it. But now, Ned went above him nearly every other time, and they changed places so regularly, that this too became a standing joke among the other boys.
Johnny was walking home from school one day with such unnatural deliberation, that Jim Brady, whose stand he was passing without seeing where he was, called out with much pretended anxiety,—
“You’re not sunstruck, or anything, are you, Johnny? I’ve heard that when folks are sunstruck, they don’t recognize their best friends!”
Johnny laughed, but not very heartily.
“I beg your pardon, Jim,” he said, “I didn’t see you, really and truly—I was thinking.”
“All right!” said Jim, cordially, “it’s hard work, thinking is, and sort of takes a fellow’s mind up! I know how it is myself.”
While he was speaking, a little lame boy, ragged, dirty, and totally unattractive-looking, shuffled up, and waited to be noticed.
“Well, Taffy,” said Jim, with a gentleness which Johnny had only seen displayed to his mother and Tiny, before, “did you sell them all
“I did, Jimmy!” and the ugly, wizened little face was brightened with a smile, “every one I sold—and look here, will you?” and he held up a silver quarter.
“Well done, you!” and Jim patted him approvingly on the back. “Now see here; here’s two tens and a five I’ll give you for it; you’ll give me one of the tens, to buy your papers for you in the morning, and the fifteen will get you a bed at Mother Rooney’s, and buy your supper and breakfast. You’d better peg right along, for it’s quite a walk from here. Be along bright and early, and I’ll have the papers ready for you.”
The little fellow nodded, and limped away.
“Who is he, anyhow?” asked Johnny, when he was out of hearing.
“Oh, I don’t know!” and Jim looked embarrassed, for the first time in his life, so far as Johnny’s knowledge of him went. “He’s a little beggar whose grandmother or something died last week, and the other people in the room kicked him out. You see, your mother had just been reading us that piece about neighbors—about that old fellow that picked up the one that was robbed, and gave him a ride, and paid for him at the tavern,and then she said it ought to be just the same way now—we ought to be looking out for chances to be neighborly, and it just happened—”
Jim had grown quite red in the face, and now he stopped abruptly.
“I think that was jolly of you,” said Johnny, warmly, “how near you did he live, before he was kicked out?”
“About two miles off, I should say, if I was to survey it,” and Jim grinned, recovering his composure as he did so.
“I often wonder at you, Johnny Leslie,” he continued, “and think maybe you came out of a penny paper story, and were swapped off for another baby, when you were little!”
“What on earth do you mean?” asked Johnny, impatiently. He was somewhat afraid of Jim’s sharp eyes and tongue.
“Oh, nothing much,” replied Jim, “it’s just my little lively way, you know. But your mother don’t think neighbors need to live next door to each other; you ask her if she does!”
“Oh!” said Johnny, “why can’t you say what you mean right out, Jim?”
“Well, I might, possibly, I suppose,” and Jim looked thoughtful, “but I’ve a general idea it wouldn’t always give satisfaction all round, and I’m the last man to hurt a fellow-critter’s feelings, as you ought to know by this time, Johnny!”
“I must go home,” said Johnny, suddenly, “Goodbye, Jim.”
“Goodbye to you,” responded Jim, affably, “I’ll be along as usual, if you’ve no previous engagement.”
“All right—but look here, Jim,” and Johnny wheeled abruptly round again, “why do you buy that little Taffy’s papers for him?”
“You’d better go home, Johnny—you might be late for your tea, my dear boy!”
“Now, Jim Brady, you tell me!”
“Because the big boys hustle him, and he can’t fight his way through because he’s lame. Now get out!”
Johnny obeyed, but he was thinking harder than ever, now. And a sort of refrain was running through his mind—a sentence from the story Jim had recalled to him: “And who is my neighbor?”
“Do you know, Johnny,” said Tiny, a few days after Johnny had met Jim, and heard about Taffy, “I don’t believe you mean to—but you are growing rather cross. Perhaps you don’t feel very well?”
Johnny burst out laughing; Tiny’s manner, as she said this, was so very funny. It was what her brother called her “school-marm air.”
“That’s much better!” said Tiny, nodding her head with a satisfied look, “I was ’most afraid you’d forget how to laugh, it’s so easy to forget things.”
“Now Tiny!” said Johnny, with the fretful sound in his voice which had struck her as a sign that he didn’t feel well, “you say a thing like that, and you think you’re smart, but it isn’t easy to forget things at all, some things, I mean. I do believe folks forget all they want to remember, and remember all they want to forget!”
“I don’t know of anything I want to forget,” remarked Tiny, “and I should not think you would either. Is it a bad dream?”
“No,” replied Johnny, “I don’t suppose it is, though sometimes it kind of seems to me as if it might be, and I’m a little in hopes I’ll wake up and find it is, after all!”
“But I do not wish to forget my bad dreams,” said Tiny, “for after they’re over, they are very interesting to remember, like that one about walking on the ceiling, you know, like a fly. It was dreadful, while it lasted, but it pleases me to think of it now. Aren’t you going to tell me what it is that you ’most hope is a dream?”
“I don’t know,” said Johnny, doubtfully, “you are a very nice little girl, Tiny, for a girl, but you can’t be expected to know about things that happen to boys. Though to be sure, this sort of thing might happen to girls, I suppose, if they went to school. You know that new boy I told you about?”
Tiny nodded.
“Well, he isn’t having much of a good time. The other fellows plague him. But I don’t see that’s it’s any of my business, now; do you?”
“I’m afraid—” began Tiny, and then stopped short.
“Out with it!” said Johnny, impatiently, “you’re afraid—what?”
“I’m afraid that’s what the priest and the Levite said,” finished Tiny, slowly.
“What do you?—oh yes, I suppose you mean about the Good Samaritan, and, ‘now which of these was neighbor?’ Is that what you’re driving at?”
Tiny nodded again, even more earnestly than before.
“Now that’s very queer,” said Johnny, musingly, “but Jim said almost exactly the same thing. He’s picked up a little lame fellow—no relation to him at all, and no more his concern than anybody’s else—and he’s keeping the boys off him, and behaving as if he was the little chap’s grandmother, and I do believe it is all because of things mamma has said to him. He doesn’t know about Ned Owen; what he said was because I happened to catch him grandmothering this little Taffy, as he calls him, but it was just exactly as if he had known all about everything. It’s very well for him; he isn’t all mixed up with the other bootblacks, the way I am with the boys at school, and he can do as he pleases, but don’t you see, Tiny, what a mess I should get myself into, right away, if I began to take up for that boy against all the others?”
Tiny replied with what Johnny considered needless emphasis,—
“I don’t see it at all, Johnny Leslie, and what’s more, I don’t believe you do either! The boys at school would only laugh at you, if the worst came to the worst, and I’m pretty sure, from things Jim has told mamma, that the kind of boys he knows would just as lief kick him, or knock him down, if they were big enough, as to look at him! And if you’d stand up for that poor little boy, I think some more of them would, too. Don’t you remember, papa said boys were a good deal like sheep; that if one went over the fence, the whole flock would come after him; sometimes, I wish I could do something for that boy! I don’t see how you can bear to let them all make fun of him, and never say a word, when it made you so mad, that time, when those two dreadful boys tried to hang my kitten. It seems to me it’s exactly the same thing!”
Tiny’s face was quite red by the time she had finished this long speech, and Johnny’s, though for a very different reason, was red too. He had been angry with Tiny, at first, but before she stopped speaking, his anger had turned against himself. She was a little frightened at her own daring in “speaking up” to Johnny in this way, but she soon saw that her fright was needless.
“Tiny,” he said, solemnly, after a rather long pause, “you can’t expect me to wish I was a girl, you know, they do have such flat times, but I will say I think its easier for them to be good than it is for boys,—in some ways, anyhow,—and I think I must be the beginning of a snob! You didn’t even look foolish the day mamma took Jim with us to see the pictures, and we met pretty much everybody we knew, and my face felt red all the time. I’m really very much obliged to you for shaking me up. I shall talk it all out with mamma, now, and see if I can’t settle myself. To think how much better a fellow Jim is than I am, when I’ve had mamma and papa and you, and he don’t even know whether he had any mother at all!” And Johnny gave utterance to his feelings in something between a howl and a groan. To his great consternation, Tiny burst into a passion of crying, hugging him, and trying to talk as she sobbed. When he at last made out what she was saying, it was something like this,—
“I thought you were going to be mean and horrid—and you’re such a dear boy—and I couldn’t bear to have you like that—and I love you so—oh, Johnny!”
Johnny may live to be a very old man; I hope he will, for good men are greatly needed, but no matter how long he lives, he will never forget the feelings that surged through his heart when he found how bitter it was to his little sister to be disappointed in him. He hugged her with all his might, and in a very choked voice he told her that he hoped she’d never have to be ashamed of him again—that she shouldn’t if he could possibly help it.
And after the talk with his mother that night, he hunted up the “silken sleeve,” which he had worn until it was threadbare, and then put away so carefully that he had a hard time to find it. It was too shabby to be put on his hat again, but somehow he liked it better than a newer one, and he stuffed it into his jacket, when he dressed the next morning, about where he supposed his heart to be. He reached the schoolhouse a few minutes before the bell rang, and found everybody but Ned Owen laughing and talking. He was sitting at his desk with a book, on which his eyes were intently fixed, held before him, but his cheeks were flushed, and his lips pressed tightly together.
Johnny did not hear anything but a confusion of voices, but he could easily guess what the talk had been about. He walked straight to his desk, and, laying his hand with apparent carelessness on Ned’s shoulder, he glanced down at the open history, saying, in his friendliest manner, which was very friendly,—
“It’s pretty stiff to-day, isn’t it? I wish I could reel off the dates the way you do, but every one I learn seems to drive out the one that went in before it!”
The flush on Ned’s face deepened, and he looked up with an expression of utter astonishment, which made Johnny tingle with shame from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. And Johnny thought afterward how, if the case had been reversed, he would have shaken off the tardy hand and given a rude answer to the long-delayed civility.
Ned replied, very quietly,—
“It is a little hard to-day, but not half so hard as—some other things!”
And just then the laughing and talking suddenly stopped, for Mr. Lennox opened the door, but Johnny had already heard a subdued whistle from one quarter and a mocking “Since when?” from another, and, what, was worse, he was sure Ned had heard them too.
To some boys it would have been nothing but a relief to find that, as Tiny had suggested, Ned’s persecutors were very much like sheep, and, with but few exceptions, followed Johnny’s lead before long, and made themselves so friendly that only a very vindictive person could have stood upon his dignity, and refused to respond. Ned was not vindictive, but he was shy and reserved; he had been hurt to the quick by the causeless cruelty of his schoolmates, and it was many days before he was “hail fellow well met” with them, although he tried hard not only to forgive, but to do what is much more difficult—forget.
As for Johnny, when he saw how, after a trifling hesitation, a few meaningless jeers and taunts, the tide turned, and Ned was taken into favor, his heart was full of remorse. It seemed to him that he had never before so clearly understood the meaning of the words, “Inasmuch as ye did it not to the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me.”
Some one has likened our life to a journey; we keep on, but we can never go back, and, as “we shall pass this way but once,” shall we not keep a bright lookout for the chances to help, to comfort, to encourage? How many loads we might lighten, how many rough places we might make smooth for tired feet! Not a day passes without giving us opportunities. Think how beautiful life might be made, and, then,—think what most of us make of it! Travellers will wander fearlessly through dark and winding ways with a torch to light their path, and a slender thread as a clue to lead them back to sunlight and safety. The Light of the World waits to “lighten our darkness, that we sleep not in death.” If we “hold fast that which is good,” we have the clue.
It’s a queer world, and no mistake.”
Jim looked unusually grave, as he gave Johnny the benefit of these words of wisdom. Johnny was on his way home from school, and he had stopped to show Jim a certain knife, about which they had conversed a good deal, at various times. It had four blades, one of them a file-blade; it was strongly made, but pretty too, with a nice smooth white handle, and a little nickel plate on one side, for the fortunate owner’s name. They had first made its acquaintance from the outside of a shop-window, where it lay in a tray with about a dozen others of various kinds, all included in the wonderful statement,—
“Your choice for fifty cents!”
Johnny and Jim had both chosen immediately, but as Johnny, who was beginning to take an interest in politics, remarked, it was one thing to nominate a knife, and quite another to elect it! A slight difficulty lay in the way of their walking boldly into the store, and announcing their choice; neither of them had, at that precise moment, floating capital to the amount of fifty cents!
“And some fellow who has fifty cents will be sure to snap up such a bargain before the day’s over,” said Johnny, mournfully. “What fun it must be to be rich, Jim; just to walk into a store when you see anything you like, and say, ‘I’ll take that,’ without even stopping to ask how much it is.”
“Yes, it sounds as if it would be,” said Jim, “but though I can’t exactly say that I’m intimate with many of ’em, it does seem to me, looking at it from the outside, as it were, that they get less sugar for a cent than some of us ’umble sons of poverty do!”
And Jim winked in a manner which Johnny admired all the more because he was unable to imitate it.
“I don’t see how you can tell,” said Johnny, “and I think you must be mistaken, Jim.”
“Well now, for instance,” replied Jim, who delighted in an argument, “I’m taking what the newspaper-poetry-man would call an ever-fresh delight in those three jolly warm nightshirts your mother had made for me. I’d never have saved the money for ’em in the world, if she hadn’t kept me up to it, and I feel as proud as Cuffee, every time I put one on, to think I paid for every stitch of it—I can’t help feeling sort of sorry that it wouldn’t be the correct thing to wear them on the street. Now do you suppose your millionaire finds any fun in buying nightshirts? I guess not! And that’s only one thing out of dozens of the same sort. See?”
“Yes,” answered Johnny, thoughtfully, “I see what you mean; I didn’t think of it in that way, before. But, all the same, I’d be willing to try being a millionaire for a day or two. And I do wish the fellow in there would kind of pile up the other knives over that white one till I can raise money enough to buy it!”
It is needless to say that the shopkeeper did not act upon this suggestion—perhaps because he did not hear it; and yet, by some singular chance, day after day passed, and still the white-handled knife remained unsold. And then Johnny’s uncle came to say goodbye, before going on a long business journey, and just as he was leaving, he put a bright half dollar in his nephew’s hand, saying,—
“I’ll not be here to help keep your birthday this year, my boy, so will you buy an appropriate present for a young man of your age and inches, and give it to yourself, with my love?”
Would he? Uncle Rob knew all about that knife, in less than five minutes, and then, as soon as he was gone, Johnny begged hard to be allowed to go out after dark, “just this once,” to secure the knife; he felt so entirely sure that it would be gone the next morning!
But it was not. And its presence in his pocket, during school hours, had a rather bad effect upon his pursuit of knowledge. On his way home, as I have said, he stopped to show his newly-acquired treasure to Jim, and he was a little disappointed that Jim did not seem more sympathetic with his joy, but simply said, thoughtfully,—
“It’s a queer world, and no mistake!”
“I don’t see anything so very queer about it, myself,” said Johnny, contentedly, adding, with a little enjoyment of having the best of it, for once, with Jim, “papa says, that if we think more than two people are queer to us, we may be pretty sure that we are the queer ones, and that the rest of the world is about as usual—at least, that’s the sense of what he said; I don’t remember the words exactly.”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself just then, for a wonder!” said Jim, with the slightly mocking expression on his face which Johnny did not like. “It’s a good enough world for me, but when I see a little chap like Taffy getting all the kicks and none of the halfpence, I don’t know exactly what to think. He’s taken a new turn, lately; twisted up with pain, half the time, and as weak as a kitten, the other half.”
“Where is he, anyhow?” asked Johnny.
“Well,” said Jim, turning suddenly red under his coat of tan, “I’ve got him round at my place. The fact is, it was too unhandy for me to go and look after him at that other place; it was noisy, too. He didn’t like it.”
Several questions rose to Johnny’s lips, but he repressed them; he had discovered that nothing so embarrassed Jim as being caught in some good work. So he only asked,—
“But how did my new knife make you think of Taffy?”
“Oh, never mind!” and Jim began to walk away.
“But I do mind!” said Johnny, following him and catching his arm. “And I do wish you wouldn’t think it is smart to be so dreadfully mysterious. Come, out with it!”
“Very well, then,” said Jim, stopping suddenly, “if you don’t like it, maybe you’ll know better another time. It made me think of him because I have been meaning to buy him one of those knives as soon as I could raise the cash, but I’ve had to spend all I could make lately for other things. The little chap keeps grunting about a knife he once found in the street, and lost again; and he seems to fancy that when he’s doing something with his hands he don’t feel the pain so much. He cuts out pictures with an old pair of scissors I happened to have, whenever I can get him any papers, but he likes best to whittle, and he broke the last blade of that old knife of mine the other day; he’s been fretting about it ever since. I’m glad you’ve got the knife, Johnny, since you’re so pleased about it, and wanted it so, but I couldn’t help thinking—” and here Jim abruptly turned a corner, and was gone before Johnny could stop him.
“I should just like to know what he told me all that yarn for!” said Johnny to himself; a little crossly. “He surely doesn’t think I ought to give my knife, my new knife, that uncle Rob gave me for a birthday present, to that little Taffy? Why, I don’t even know him!”
And Johnny tried to banish such a ridiculous idea from his mind at once. But somehow it would not be banished. The thought came back to him again and again; how many things he had to make life sweet and pleasant to him; how few the little lonely boy, shut up all day in Jim’s dingy bed room, the window of which did not even look on a street, but on a narrow back yard, where the sun never shone. The more he thought of it, the more it appealed to his pity. And here was a chance,—but no, surely people could not be expected to make such sacrifices as that.
He managed to shake off the troublesome thought for a few minutes, when he showed the knife to his mother and Tiny. They both admired it to his heart’s content, and said what a bargain it was, and what a wonder that nobody had bought it before, and what a suitable thing for him to buy for Uncle Rob’s birthday present to him. But, when he went up to his room, the question again forced itself upon him, and would not be shaken off. Over and over again in his mind, as they had done that other time, the words repeated themselves,—
“And who is my neighbor?”
He did not see Jim again for several days, and this made him unreasonably angry. It seemed to him that Jim had taken things for granted altogether too easily. How did Jim know that he, Johnny, was not waiting for a chance to send the knife to poor little Taffy?
But was he? He really hardly knew himself until one day when, by dint of hard running, he caught Jim, and asked him,—
“See here! How’s that little chap, and what’s gone with you lately?”
“He’s worse,” said Jim, gruffly, “and I’m busy—that’s what’s gone with me. I can’t stop, I’m in a hurry.”
“Oh, very well!” said Johnny, in an offended tone. “I thought we were friends, Jim Brady, but I’ll not bother you any more. Goodbye.”
“Johnny,” said Jim, putting his hand on Johnny’s shoulder as he spoke, “can’t you make any allowance for a fellow’s being in trouble? I can’t stop now, I really and truly can’t, but I’ll be on the corner by the library this afternoon, and if you choose to stop, I’ll talk all you want me to.”
“All right, I’ll come,” said Johnny, his wounded self-love forgotten at sight of Jim’s troubled face.
He hurried home, and, with the help of an old table knife, he managed to work ten cents out of the jug that he had “set up” for a Christmas present fund. With this he bought the largest picture paper he could find for the money. Then he gathered together a handful of pictures he had been saving for his scrap book, wrapped the knife first in them, then in the large paper, and then tied the whole up securely in a neat brown paper parcel.
When he saw Jim that afternoon he asked him as cautiously as he could about Taffy’s needs, and at last he said,—
“Jim, why haven’t you told mamma about him, and let her help you?”
“It seemed like begging. I didn’t like—” and Jim stopped, looking very much embarrassed.
“Well, I mean to tell her as soon as I go home,” said Johnny, resolutely, “for I know she’ll go and see him, and have something done to make him better, and—Jim, I must go now, but will you please give this to Taffy, with my love?”
And, putting the parcel in Jim’s hand, Johnny turned, and ran home.
But was he really the same Johnny? Had wings grown on his feet? Had his heart been suddenly changed into a feather? He whistled, he sang, he stopped to turn somersets on the grass in the square. No one but his Captain had known of the battle. None, but the Giver of it, knew of the victory.
Johnny had been talking to his mother, as he often talked, about a Bible verse which he did not fully understand—
“But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which seeth in secret,”—and she had told him that a sacrifice, to be real and whole-hearted, must be made not only willingly, but cheerfully; “not grudgingly, or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful giver.”
“I don’t wonder at all at that, mamma,” Johnny had replied, “when you think how hateful it is to have people do things for you as if they didn’t wish to. I’d rather go without a thing, than take it when people are that way.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Leslie, “people do sometimes say ‘oh bother’ when ‘certainly’ would be more appropriate,”—Johnny laughed, but he blushed a little, too—“and ‘directly,’ or ‘in a minute,’” continued his mother, “when it would be more graceful, to say the least of it, to go at once, without any words. We forget too often that ‘even Christ pleased not Himself,’ and we fret over the disturbing of our own little plans and arrangements, as if we were all Great Moguls.”
“You don’t, mammy,” and Johnny kissed his mother in the particular spot, just under her chin, where he always kissed her when he felt unusually affectionate.
“Oh, yes I do, dear, oftener than you know,” said Mrs. Leslie, “but I am trying all the time, and when I am nearly sure that I am going to be cross, I go away by myself, if I can, for a few minutes, where I can fight it out without punishing any one else, and when I can’t do that, I ask for strength just to keep perfectly still until pleasant words will come.”
“You’ve been practising so long, mamma,” said Johnny, wistfully, “that you’re just about perfect, I think; but I don’t believe I will be, if I live to be as old as Methusaleh! I wish I had some sort of an arrangement to clap on the outside of my mouth, that would hold it shut for five minutes!”
“But don’t you see, dear,”—and Mrs. Leslie laughed a little at Johnny’s idea—“that if you had time to remember to clap on your ‘arrangement,’ you would have time to stop yourself in another and better way?”
“Yes, mamma, I suppose I should,” admitted Johnny, “but it somehow seems as if the other way would be easier, especially if I had the ‘arrangement’ somewhere where I could always see it.”
“But don’t you remember, dear,” said his mother, “that even after Moses lifted up the brazen serpent, the poor Israelites were not saved by it unless they looked up at it? That came into my mind the other day when we were playing the new game—‘Hiding in plain sight,’ you know. Every time we failed to find the thimble, it was in such ‘plain sight’ that we laughed at ourselves for being so stupid, and then I thought how exactly like that we are about ‘the ever-present help.’ It is always ready for us, and then we go looking everywhere else, and wonder that we fail! And I think you would find it so with your ‘arrangement.’ You would see it and use it, perhaps, for a day or two, and then you would grow used to it, and it would be invisible to you half the time, at least.”
This game of “Hiding in plain sight” was one which Ned Owen had recently taught them, and it was very popular both at school and in the different homes. A thimble was the favorite thing to hide; all but the hider either shut their eyes or went out of the room, while he placed the thimble in some place where it could be very plainly seen—if one only knew where to look for it! Sometimes it would be on a little point of the gas fixture; sometimes on top of a picture-frame or mantel-ornament, and then the hider generally had the pleasure of seeing the seekers stare about the room with puzzled faces, and finally give it up, when he would point it out triumphantly, and they would all exclaim at their stupidity.
The rule was, that if any one found it, he was merely to say so, and not to point it out to the rest.
Johnny was very much impressed with his mother’s comparison, and resolved, as he said to himself, to “look sharper” for the small chances of self-denial which come to all of us, while large chances come but to few, or only at long intervals. There was a poem of which Mrs. Leslie was very fond, and which Tiny and Johnny had learned just to please her, which had this verse in it:—
“I would not have the restless will
That hurries to and fro,
Seeking for some great thing to do,
Or secret thing to know.
I would be dealt with as a child,
And guided where to go.”
And another verse ended with,—
“More careful, than to serve Thee much,
To please Thee perfectly.”
Tiny and Johnny were given to “making believe” all sorts of startling and thrilling adventures, in which they rescued people from avalanches, and robbers, and railway-accidents; and, to do Tiny justice, all this making believe did not in the least interfere with the sweet obedience and thoughtfulness for the comfort of others which marked her little life every day. She was much more practical than Johnny was, and would never have thought of these wonderful “pretends” by herself, but she was always ready to join him in whatever he proposed, unless she knew it to be wrong, and he was quite proud of the manner in which she had learned from him to invent and suggest things in this endless game of “pretending.”
But while it did her no harm at all, I am afraid it sometimes made Johnny feel that the small, everyday chances which came in his way were not worth much, and this was why his mother had made her little suggestions about self-denial. So, though Johnny still hoped that he could think of, or discover, some “great thing,” he resolved to be very earnest, meanwhile, in looking out for the small ones.
He had just begun to study Latin, and it was costing him many groans, and a good deal of hard work. He did not exactly rebel against it, for he knew how particularly his father wished him to be a good Latin scholar, but he expressed to Tiny, freely and often, his sincere wish that it had never been invented.
He went back to school immediately after dinner, one day, in order to “go over” his lesson once more. He had studied it faithfully the afternoon before, but one great trouble with it was that it did not seem to “stay in his head” as his other lessons did when he learned them in good earnest.
“It’s just like trying to hang your hat up on nothing, mamma,” he said, mournfully, as he kissed his mother goodbye.
He had counted on having the schoolroom entirely to himself, so he felt a little vexed when he saw one of the smaller boys already at his desk in a distant corner, and his “Hello, Ted! What’s brought you back so early?” was not so cordial as it was inquiring.
He realized this, and felt a little ashamed of himself when Ted answered, meekly,—
“I didn’t think I’d be in anybody’s way, Johnny, and if I don’t know my map questions this afternoon, I’ve got to go down to the lower class!”
The little boy’s face looked very doleful as he said this; it would not be pleasant to have his stupidity proclaimed, as it were, in this public manner. Not that his teacher was doing it with any such motive as this. Teddy had missed that particular lesson so frequently, of late, that Mr. Lennox was nearly sure it was too hard for him, and that it would be only right, for Teddy’s own sake, to put him in a lower class; and this was why, if to-day’s lesson, which was unusually easy, proved too hard for him, the change was to be made.
“You’re not in my way a bit, Ted,” said Johnny, heartily, “and this bothering old Latin is as hard for me as your map questions are for you, so we’ll be miserable together—‘misery loves company’ you know.”
With that Johnny sat down and opened his book, but his mind, instead of settling on the lesson, busied itself with the unhappy little face in the corner.
“But if I go over there and help him,” said Johnny, to himself, almost speaking aloud in his earnestness, “I’ll miss my own lesson, sure!”
“And suppose you do,” said the other Johnny, “you will only get a bad mark in a good cause, but if Teddy misses his, he will be humiliated before the whole school.”
“But papa doesn’t like me to have bad marks.”
“Don’t be a mean little hypocrite, Johnny Leslie! If your father knew all about it, which would he mind most, a bad mark in your report, or a worse one in your heart? And besides, you’ve twenty-five minutes, clear. You can do both, if you’ll not be lazy.”
That settled it—that, and a sort of fancy that he heard his mother saying,—
“Even Christ pleased not Himself.”
He sprang up so suddenly that Teddy fairly “jumped,” and went straight over to the corner, saying, as he resolutely sat down,—
“Here, show me what’s bothering you, young man, and perhaps I can help you. Don’t stop to palaver—there’s no time!”
But Teddy really couldn’t help saying,—
“Oh, thank you, Johnny!” and then he went at once to business.
“It’s all the capitals,” he said, “I can learn them fast enough, when I’ve found them, but it does seem to me that the folks who make maps hide the capitals and rivers and mountains, on purpose. Now, of course Maine has a capital, I s’pose, but can you see it? I can’t, a bit.”
“Why, here it is, as plain as the nose on your face,” said Johnny, and put his finger on it without loss of time.
Teddy screwed up his eyes and forehead as he looked at the map, saying finally,—
“So it is! I saw that, but it looked like ‘Atlanta,’ and I didn’t see the star at all.”
This was repeated with almost every one; Teddy was unusually quick at committing to memory, but he made what at first seemed to Johnny the most stupid blunders in seeing. However, the lesson was learned, or rather, Teddy was in a fair way to have it learned, and Johnny was back at his Latin, fifteen minutes before the bell rang. And, to his astonishment, the Latin no longer refused to be conquered. He had done good work at it, the day before, better work than he knew, and now, feeling how little time he had left, he studied with unusual spirit and resolution. When the bell rang, he was quite ready for it, and his recitation that afternoon was entirely perfect, for the first time since he began that terrible study. He did not know how much more he had gained in the conquest of his selfishness; but all large victories are built upon many small ones, and the same is, if possible, even truer of all large defeats. Habit is powerful, to help or to hinder.
And a most unexpected good to little Ted grew out of that day’s experience; one of the things which prove, if it needs proving, that we never can tell where the result of our smallest words and deeds will stop. One of Johnny’s young cousins had recently been suffering much from head-ache, which was at last found to be caused wholly by a defect in her eyes. They saw unequally, and a pair of spectacles remedied the defect and stopped the head-ache, beside affording much enjoyment for the cousinhood over her venerable appearance. Johnny was puzzling over Teddy’s apparent stupidity in one way, and evident brightness in another, when he suddenly remembered his cousin Nanny, and clapped his hands, saying to himself as he did so,—
“That’s it, I do believe! He can’t see straight!”
Johnny lost no time in suggesting this to Teddy, who, in his turn, spoke of it to his mother. She had already begun to notice the strained look about his eyes, and she took him at once to an oculist. The result was, that he shortly afterward appeared in a pair of spectacles, and told Johnny with some little pride,—
“The eye doctor says that, as far as seeing goes, one of my eyes might about as well have been in the back of my head; and it seems queer, but everything looks different—I didn’t know so many things were straight! And you won’t catch me missing my map questions any more! Why, the places seem fairly to jump at me, now. And—and—I do hope I can do something for you before long, Johnny, for it’s all your doing, you know. If you hadn’t helped me that day, there’s no telling when I’d have found it out.”
“Don’t you worry about doing something for me, Ted,” said Johnny, kindly. “You’ve done enough, just putting on those spectacles. You look exactly like your grandfather seen through the wrong end of a spyglass!”
After that first perfect Latin lesson, Johnny’s road to success seemed in a measure broken, and though he by no means achieved perfection every time, his failures were less total and humiliating, day by day, and, to use his own beautiful simile about the hat, he began to find “pegs” in his head whereon he could hang his daily stint of Latin. But it was still hard work; there was no denying that; and if his affection for his father had not been very strong and true, the task would have been still more difficult. But somehow, whenever Mr. Leslie came home looking more tired than usual, or turned into a joke one of the many little acts of self-denial and unselfish courtesy which helped to make his home so bright, it seemed to Johnny that it would be mean indeed to grumble over this one thing, which he was doing to please his father.
He had been much impressed by the manner in which he had learned that first perfect lesson, for, on the previous Sunday, when he had recited the verses which told how the five barley loaves and two small fishes had fed the hungry multitude in the wilderness, he had thought, and said, that it must have been easier for those people who saw the Master perform such miracles, to follow him, than it was now for those who must “walk by faith” entirely, with no gracious face and voice to draw them on.
His mother did not contradict him, just then; she rarely did, when he said anything like that; she preferred to wait, and let him find out for himself, with more or less help from her. So she only answered, this time,—
“Was the thimble really hidden last night, Johnny? You know I was called away before anybody found it, and you were all declaring that this time, you were sure, it couldn’t be ‘in plain sight.’”
Johnny laughed, but he looked a little foolish, too, as he answered,—
“Why no, mamma—it was perched on the damper of the stove. I declare, that game puzzles me more and more every time we play it; I might as well be an idiot and be done with it! But what made you think of that just now, mamma dear?”
“I suppose it came into my mind because I want you to look a little harder before you let yourself be quite certain about the miracles,” replied his mother, “and I will give you a sort of clue. You know papa’s business is a very absorbing one, and you often hear people wondering how he finds time for all the other things he does, but I never wonder; it seems to me that he gives all his time to the Master, and that he is so free from worrying care—so sure he will have time enough for all that is really needful, that he loses none in fretting or hesitating; he just goes right on. There is a dear old saying of the Friends that I always like—‘Proceed as the way opens.’ Now if you will think about it, and about how uses for money, and for all our gifts and talents, come in some way to all who are in earnest about using them rightly, perhaps you will see what I mean. ‘A heart at leisure from itself’ can do a truly wonderful amount of work for other people.”
A dim idea of his mother’s meaning had come into Johnny’s mind, even then, and suddenly, after he had done work which he had thought would fill half an hour, in fifteen minutes, a flash of light followed, and he “saw plainly.”
I cannot tell you of all the small chances which came to him daily, but many of them you can guess by looking for your own. He tried hard to remember what his mother had said about willing service and cheerful giving. “Oh bother!” was not heard very often, now, and when it was, it was generally followed speedily by some “little deed of kindness” which showed that it had been repented of.
He was rushing home from school one day in one of his “cyclones,” as Tiny called the wild charges which he made upon the house when he was really in a hurry. It was a half-holiday, and most of the boys had agreed to go skating together, just as soon as some ten or fifteen mothers could be brought within shouting distance. The ice was lasting unusually late, and the weather was delightfully clear and cold, but everybody knew that a thaw must come before long, in the nature of things, and everybody who skated felt that it really was a sort of duty to make the most of the doomed ice, while it lasted.
Johnny was like the Irishman’s gun in one respect—he could “shoot round a corner;” but he did not always succeed in hitting anything, as he did to-day. The anything, this time, happened to be Jim Brady, and as Jim was going very nearly as fast as Johnny was, neither had breath enough left, after the collision, to say anything for at least a minute. Then Jim managed to inquire, between his gasps,—
“Any lives lost on your side, Johnny?”
“No, I b’lieve not,” said Johnny, rather feebly, and then they both leaned against the fence, and laughed.
“I was coming after you, Johnny,” began Jim, and then he stopped to breathe again.
“Well, you found me!” said Johnny, who, being smaller and lighter than Jim, was first to recover from the shock, “but tell me what it is, please, quick, for I’m in a hurry!”
And almost without knowing that he did so, he squared his elbows to run on again. Jim saw the motion, and his face clouded over.
“I can’t tell you everything I had to say in half a second, so I’ll not bother you; maybe, I can find somebody else,” and Jim began to walk off.
Johnny sprang after him, caught his arm, and gave him a little shake, saying as he did so,—
“See here, Jim Brady, if you don’t stop putting on airs at me like this, I’ll—I’ll—” and he stopped for want of a threat dire enough for the occasion.
“I would,” said Jim, dryly, “but if I were you, I’d find out first what airs was—were—and who was putting ’em on. I see you’re in a hurry, and I’m sorry I stopped you. Let go of my arm, will you?”
“No, I won’t!” said Johnny, “so there now! And if you won’t be decent, and turn ’round, and walk towards home with me, why, I’ll walk along with you till you tell me what you were going to say. I never did see such a—” and again Johnny stopped for want of a word that suited him.
Jim made no answer, and his face remained sullen, but he turned at once, and the two walked on arm in arm, toward Johnny’s home.
“Well,” said Johnny, presently, “we’re ’most there. Are you going to say anything?”
“I wouldn’t, if it was for myself—not if you hung on to me for a week!” and Jim’s face worked; Johnny even thought his voice trembled a little.
“Taffy’s sick,” continued Jim, “and I can’t find out what ails him. He says he don’t hurt anywhere, but he won’t eat, and as far as I can make out he don’t sleep much, and he feels as if he was red hot. And all he cares for is when I am with him evenings, and read to him. That old Turkess where I have the room sort of looks after him; she knows I’ll look after her if she doesn’t! But it must be lonesome for the little chap all day, and yet I daresn’t lose any more time with him than I do now, or I wouldn’t have the money—I mean—oh, I can’t leave my business for anybody! And I thought, maybe, you’d give him an hour two or three times a week, Johnny; so I set a fellow to mind my stand, and if you can come, and your mother doesn’t mind, I’ll show you the way.”
Johnny was silent a moment. How the sun shone, and how the pond sparkled and glittered! Three or four of the boys, at a distant street corner, beckoned frantically to him with their skates, to hurry him.
Perhaps you think Johnny must have been very selfish, to hesitate even for a moment, but then, you know, you are looking at him, and not at yourself! Before Jim’s sensitive pride had time to take fire again, the answer was ready.
“I’ll do it, Jim,” said Johnny, cordially, “if you’ll wait half a second till I ask mamma—she always likes to know where I am.”
“Thank you,” said Jim, briefly, and then, with a sudden thought, he asked,—
“Have you had your dinner yet?”
“Why no! I forgot all about it!” and Johnny suddenly realized that he was alarmingly hungry.
“You see,” he added, “I had a big sandwich at recess, and somebody gave me an apple, so I can just ask mamma to save me something, and go right along with you; you can’t be away from your stand all the afternoon, I suppose.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” said Jim, firmly, “I’ll wait for you out here, so go in, and eat as much as you can hold. I’m in no hurry whatsomever!”
And Jim leaned against the fence with as much composure as if the keen March wind had been a June zephyr.
He felt a little surprise, however, when Johnny, without another word, marched into the house and left him there; a surprise which did not last long, for in less than five minutes, Mrs. Leslie’s hand was on his shoulder, and she was gently pushing him up the steps, and into the dining-room.
“Oh please, Mrs. Leslie!” and Jim’s face grew suddenly red, “I’m not fit. I didn’t wait to fix up—I’m not a bit hungry!”
His distress was so evidently real, that Mrs. Leslie paused, half way to the table.
“I’ll compromise,” she said, laughing, “since you are too proud to come in anything but full dress, you shall hide yourself here, and we’ll pretend you didn’t come in at all!”
She opened the door into the neat, cosey inner kitchen. No one was there, and Jim sat down by the fire with a feeling of great relief. For dinner had just been put on table, in the dining-room; Tiny, in spotless white apron and shining yellow curls, stood by her chair, and he murmured to himself,—
“I’d ’a’ choked to death, first mouthful!”
The dining-room door was not quite closed, and presently he heard Tiny saying,—
“Oh, please let me, mamma! I want to—please!”
And then she came softly in with a tempting plate of dinner, which she set upon the table.
“There!” she said, “there’s some of everything there, except the pudding, and I’ll bring you that when we have ours. I’m so glad you came to-day, because there’s a Brown Betty. I think you’d better sit this way, hadn’t you? Then you can look at the fire; it looks nice, such a cold day.”
It was all said and done with such simple sweetness and good-will, that Jim’s defences gave way at once.
“Thank you, Miss Tiny,” he said, with the grave politeness which never failed him when he spoke either to her or to her mother, and he sat down at once in the place she had chosen—for worlds he would not have wounded that gentle spirit. And he found it no hardship, after all, to eat the dinner she had brought him; what “growing boy” could have resisted it?
After dinner, when the comforting food had done more than he knew to put him in good-humor, Mrs. Leslie asked him many questions about Taffy, filling a basket as she talked, with jelly and delicate rusks and oranges. A few of the questions were by way of making sure that the place was a safe one for Johnny. She meant to go herself, the next day, to see the little boy, but she did not wish to interfere to-day with the arrangement which Jim had made. So the two boys went off together, and Jim, sure now of Johnny’s good-will, and a little ashamed of his own “cantankerousness,” as he called it to himself, talked about Taffy all the way, but only as they neared the door of the dreary lodging-house did Jim succeed in saying what lay nearest his heart.
“I haven’t told you the worst of it, Johnny,” he said, in a troubled voice, from which all the usual mocking good-nature was gone, “the little chap has somehow found out that he’s dying, and—he’s afraid!”
There was no time for more; they were already on the stairs, and Johnny gave a sort of groan; who was he to comfort that little trembling soul?
“Oh,” he thought, “if mamma were only here!”
The room they entered was much more neat and clean than Johnny had expected to find it, and there was even some attempt at decoration, in the way of picture cards and show bills tacked upon the dingy walls. A stove, whose old age and infirmities were concealed by much stove-blacking, held a cheerful little fire, and the panes of the one window were bright and clear. The bed, which looked unpleasantly hard, and was scantily furnished, had been pulled to a place between the fire and the window, and Taffy, sitting up against a skilfully arranged chair-back and two thin pillows, looked eagerly towards the door as it opened. The sharp, thin little face brightened with a smile, as he saw Jim, but he did not speak.
“Taffy,” said Jim, gently, “here’s Johnny Leslie. He’s come to see you, and read to you a little bit. He’s Miss Tiny’s brother, you know, and Mrs. Leslie’s son. Won’t you shake hands with him?”
Taffy held out his hand, nodding to Johnny with much friendliness.
“Oh, yes,” he said, in a voice so low and hoarse that Johnny bent nearer to catch his meaning. “I’ll shake hands with him; I thought it was some strange boy, but that’s different.”
“And see,” continued Jim, opening the basket, and setting out the things upon a rough pine table, which held a pitcher of water and a tumbler, two or three medicine bottles, a very small orange, and a big red apple, which Johnny recognized; he had given it to Jim a day or two ago. The little fellow’s eyes sparkled as he saw the pretty eatables come out of the basket, one after another, and he stroked the glass which held the bright-colored jelly, saying hoarsely,—
“That’s pretty, that is. His folks must be rich,” and he nodded toward Johnny.
“I must go now,” Jim said, not noticing this last remark of Taffy’s, “but Johnny will stay awhile, and after that it won’t be long till I’m home. Be a good boy, and don’t bother Johnny; he’s not used to you like I am.”
Jim went, with a very friendly goodbye; and Johnny was left alone with Taffy, who eyed him shyly, but did not speak.
“Wouldn’t you like some of this jelly?” asked Johnny, hastily; “I can put some in this empty tumbler for you, you know, so as not to muss it all up at once.”
Taffy shook his head.
“Well, then, an orange?” went on Johnny. “I know a first-rate way to fix an orange, the way they do ’em in Havana, where they grow. Papa showed me, the winter he went there. Shall I do one for you? I don’t believe you ever ate one that way.”
Taffy nodded eagerly, opening his parched lips, but still not speaking. So Johnny hunted up a fork, and then, with Taffy’s knife, cut a round, thick slice of skin, about the size of a half-dollar, off the stem and blossom ends of the orange. These pieces of skin he put together, and stuck the fork through them. Then he peeled half the orange, cutting off all the white skin, as well as the yellow, then he stuck it on the fork, at the peeled end, finished peeling it, and handed it to Taffy, who had been looking on with breathless interest.
“There!” said Johnny, “you just hold on to the fork, and bite, and you’ll get all the good part of the orange, and none of the bad.”
“Now wasn’t that first-rate?” he asked, as Taffy handed him back the fork, with the “bad” of the orange on it.
Taffy laughed delightedly. His shyness was quite gone, but Johnny saw that his breath came with difficulty, and that it cost him an effort to speak.
“When I get well, and go sellin’ papers again,” he said, “I’ll fix up oranges that way on sticks. Folks would buy ’em, hot days; now don’t you think they would?”
“Why, yes,” said Johnny, seeing he was expected to answer, “I daresay they would.”
“The old woman down there,” and Taffy pointed to the floor, “she says I’m dyin’. Don’t you think she’s just tryin’ to scare me? Now don’t you, Johnny Leslie?”
Johnny was dismayed. What should he say? He sent up a swift, silent prayer for help, then he spoke, very gently.
“Taffy, you’ve heard Jim tell about my mother, haven’t you?”
Taffy silently nodded.
“Well, suppose, while I’m here, my sister Tiny was to come, to say mother wanted me to go home; do you think I’d be afraid to go—home, to mother and father, you know?”
Taffy shook his head.
“Then, don’t you see,” pursued Johnny, and in his earnestness he took the little hot hands, and held them fast. “That when our Father in Heaven says He wants us, we needn’t be afraid to go? Mother says we oughtn’t to be—not if we love Him.”
Johnny was afraid that Taffy would not understand, but he did. Since Jim had taken charge of him, he had begun to go to Sunday-school, and having quick ears and a good memory, he had learned fast.
“But s’pos’n we ain’t minded him?” and the feverish grasp on Johnny’s hands grew tighter.
“We haven’t minded Him, any of us,” said Johnny, softly, “and that’s why our Saviour died for us. Now see here, Taffy; if a big boy was going to whip you, because you’d taken something of his, and Jim stepped up, and said, ‘Here, I’ll take the whipping, if you’ll let him go,’ then you wouldn’t be whipped at all. Don’t you see?”
“I didn’t know it meant just that,” said Taffy, “what made Him do it, anyhow, if He didn’t have to?”
“Because He loved us—because He was so sorry for us!” Johnny’s voice trembled as he said this; it seemed to him that he had never before fully realized what the Saviour had done for the world. “He wanted to have us all safe and happy with Him in Heaven, after we die, and it’ll be only our own fault, if we don’t get there—just the same as if a wonderful doctor was to come in, right now, and tell you to take his medicine, and he’d make you well, and then you wouldn’t take the medicine.”
“But I would, though!” said Taffy, eagerly, and as if he half believed it would happen. “I’d take it, if it was ever so nasty, but the doctor Jim fetched, he said he couldn’t do nothing for me, only make me a little easier. Do you s’pose he knew?”
“Yes,” said Johnny, gravely, “I’m afraid he did, Taffy; but we needn’t be afraid, either of us. The Saviour is stronger, and cares more about us, than all the doctors in the world.”
Taffy did not answer; he lay back, looking up through the window at the little patch of blue sky that showed between the tops of the tall houses. Johnny could not tell whether or not his words had given any comfort. He read a little story from a paper Tiny had sent, and Taffy listened with eager interest; then a distant clock struck four, and Johnny rose to go. Taffy made no objection to being left alone, but when Johnny took his hand for goodbye, he said,—
“Come to-morrow. I want to hear more about Him.”
“I will if I can,” said Johnny, “but I go to school, you know. To-day was a half holiday.”
Taffy made no answer to this, but he nodded and smiled, as Johnny backed out of the door.
Mrs. Leslie went the next day to see the poor little boy, and many times after that; Tiny was allowed to go once or twice, but she was not so strong as Johnny was, and felt everything more keenly, so her mother did not think it best to let her go often.
And now Johnny had a full chance to test his desire for self-denial. Taffy could not himself have told why he preferred Johnny to every one else, but so it was, and many were the hidden battles which Johnny fought with self-love, not always coming off conqueror, but struggling up again, after each defeat, with a fresh sense of his own helplessness, and a stronger dependence on the “One who is mighty.”
It was hard to tell just when Taffy passed out from under the cloud of fear into the full sunshine of the “knowledge and love of God,” but, as his poor little body grew weaker, the eager soul seemed to strengthen, and be filled with love and joy. Then he began to express his wish that “everybody” might be told about the Saviour, and he lost no chance of telling, himself, when kind-hearted neighbors came in to help Jim with him.
The words “obedient unto death” having once been read and explained to him, seemed constantly in his mind, and once, after lying still for a long while, he said,—
“They killed Him—cruel! cruel!—and He never stopped ’em, and now see how nice and easy He lets me lie here and die in my bed!”
It was the evening before Easter Sunday, that lovely festival which is finding its way into all hearts and churches; the last bell was ringing for evening service, and Johnny had just taken his seat, with his mother and Tiny, in the church which they attended, when, to his great surprise, Jim stepped quietly in, and sat down beside him. Jim was very neatly dressed in his Sunday suit, but the flaming necktie which he usually wore was replaced by a small bow of black ribbon. His face had a gentle and subdued expression quite unusual to it, and Johnny felt sure, at once, that Taffy was gone.
As the boys knelt side by side in the closing prayer, their hands met in a warm, close grasp, and a smothered sob from Jim told how deeply his heart was touched.
Taffy had died that evening, very peacefully, in his sleep, a few minutes after Jim came home from his work.
“And I somehow felt as if, maybe, I’d get a little nearer to him, if I was to come to church,” said Jim, in a subdued voice, as he walked part of the way home with Mrs. Leslie, “and I thought, maybe, you wouldn’t mind if I came to your pew, it seemed sort of lonesome everywhere.”
Mrs. Leslie made him very sure that she did not “mind,” and would not, no matter how often he came there.
And he came regularly, after that. At first he sat with his friends; then he chose a sitting among the free seats in the church, and sat there, but he found that, in this way, he was apt to have a different place every Sunday, and this he did not like. It made him feel as if he did not “belong anywhere,” he told Johnny; so, as soon as he could command the money, he rented half a pew for himself, and after that he nearly always brought some one with him. Once or twice it was the old woman who kept the eating-stand where he usually bought his lunch; sometimes it was a wild, rather frightened-looking street Arab, sometimes a fellow bootblack.
He evidently enjoyed doing the honors of his half pew, but there was a deeper and better motive under that; the soul that has heard its own “call” is eager that other souls should hear, too.
Perhaps, if you had seen Johnny starting for school on a certain Thursday of which I mean to tell you, you would have thought that somebody was imposing on his good nature, for he carried in his book-strap a very large bundle, so large, that there was scarcely room enough left in the strap for his geography and arithmetic. But a glance at his face would have told you that he did not feel in the least “put upon,” for he looked very well satisfied, and ran back, when he reached the gate, to give his mother an extra kiss.
The bundle contained a great deal of sewing for a woman in whom Mrs. Leslie was interested, and it meant that Johnny was to be trusted to go quite alone to this woman’s home, which was a long way from his own, and near the park. He was to go after school, and when he had done his errand, he was to be allowed to go to the park, and watch a base-ball match which was to take place that afternoon, until it should be time to come home to tea. And this was not all. By way of saving precious time, he was to take his dinner to school with him, and eat it at the noon recess, and there it was in Tiny’s new straw basket—three sandwiches, two hard-boiled eggs, with a little paper of salt, a very large and a middling-sized piece of gingerbread, and a slice of yesterday’s “queen of puddings.”
“You’d better save a sandwich and the gingerbread to eat at the park,” said Mrs. Leslie, as she packed this delightful dinner, “you can wrap them in this nice piece of paper—see, it is that large brown envelope in which my handkerchiefs came—for it will not be best to take Tiny’s basket with you, you might so easily lose it. You can leave it in your desk, and bring it home to-morrow. And be sure to ask somebody what time it is, as soon as the sun is down to the tops of the trees in the park—you can see them quite well from the base-ball ground, you know—and don’t stay later than half past five, dear.
“All right, mamma,” said Johnny, cheerfully, “what a jolly dinner! I hope I shan’t be too hungry at twelve to save the cake and sandwich, but I don’t know!”
Mrs. Leslie laughed, but she made another sandwich, and cut another slice of cake, and perhaps it was the recollection of this generous deed which sent Johnny back for one more kiss.
He had hard work to keep his thoughts where they belonged during school hours, but he succeeded pretty well, for he thought it would be “mean” not to behave at least as well as usual, with such a treat in prospect. He also succeeded in saving the cake and sandwich. “But I couldn’t have done it,” he thought, as he wrapped them in the nice brown envelope, ready for an immediate start, when school should be out, “if mamma hadn’t put in that last sandwich and piece of cake!”
Some proverb maker has said that “chosen burdens are light,” and Johnny certainly did not seem weighed down by his burden, as he hailed a horse car, and stepped gayly on board. When they came to the “up-grade” he felt like shaking hands with the patient extra horse, and telling him how many good thoughts he had caused. And then he resolved to be more on the lookout for chances to help the heavily-laden; perhaps he had kept too near home with his efforts; he would try to do more.
He did not put into words, in his mind, the feeling that he had so many things to make him happy, that he ought to hand some of his happiness on to less favored people, but it was some such feeling as this which prompted his resolve, and made him shyly offer his envelope-full of lunch to a very ragged and dirty little newsboy, who was being hustled out of the car by the conductor. It was accepted without the least shyness, and also without any very special thanks; but Johnny, craning his neck backward as the car moved on, saw the delighted face of the little fellow, as he opened the envelope, and was more than satisfied. It set him thinking of Taffy, and that was a thought which always filled his heart with a sort of quiet Sunday happiness.
He found the house where he was to leave the bundle, without any trouble, and his knock was answered by the woman for whom it was intended. She was a gentle-faced, tired-looking little woman, and she held on one arm a sturdy baby-boy, who seemed trying to make himself heavier by kicking and struggling. She attempted to take the bundle with her free hand, but Johnny held it fast, saying pleasantly,—
“If you’ll tell me where you want it put, Mrs. Waring, I’ll take it in for you.”
“Oh, thank you,” she answered, “you’re very kind—right in here, please,” and she led the way to a room which would have been quite pretty and attractive, if it had been in order, but it was evident that Master Baby had had everything his own way, at least for the past few hours.
“I can’t keep things straight five minutes,” said his mother, wearily, “as fast as I get settled with my work at the machine, he’s into something, and I have to jump up and take it away from him. Some of the kind ladies I sew for have given him nice playthings, but no—he just wants everything he can’t have, and he’s got so heavy, lately, that I can’t take him about with me as I did. There’s a parcel of work that I promised to take home this afternoon, and I don’t see how I’m going to do it, for the neighbor that offered to mind him had to leave home unexpectedly, and it isn’t safe to trust him for five minutes, let alone two hours!”
“Maybe I could leave it on my way home,” said Johnny, “where’s it to go?”
“You’re very kind,”—she said, gratefully, “but it’s quite the other way from your house, and besides, I’ve forgotten the number, though I know the house when I come to it. No, I’ll just have to wait till to-morrow, but I did want the money to-night.”
Johnny stood irresolute for a minute or two; could he give up his chance to watch that game of base-ball? But was not this another chance? Yes, he would do it!
“See here, Mrs. Waring,” he said, earnestly, “if it’s only to watch the little chap, and keep him out of mischief, I could do that, as well as anybody. He doesn’t seem afraid of me, and he has lots of things here to play with. You just go, and I’ll stay here till you come back—I suppose you’ll be back by five?”
“Oh yes, easily,” she replied, “and I’d trust you with the baby quick enough, for there’s not many boys would offer, but I’m afraid your mother will worry about you if you stay so long. And besides, I’d hate to keep you in the house such a nice, bright afternoon.”
“Mamma wouldn’t worry,” said Johnny. “She doesn’t expect me home till tea time; and you needn’t mind keeping me in, just for once.”
There was a little more talk about it, and then Mrs. Waring consented to go, and Johnny was left alone with the baby, whose name, as he had ascertained, was Phil, and who seemed quite pleased with his new nurse. He was a good-natured, rollicking baby, and he pulled Johnny about the room, talking in his own fashion, and trying one sort of mischief after another, looking up with roguish laughter as Johnny gently stopped him. But at last his fat legs seemed to grow tired, and he subsided on the floor, where he actually remained quiet for five minutes, trying to make his wooden horse “eat” a large India-rubber ball. Johnny found he was tired, too, and he sat down on the sofa, where, unfortunately, he had thrown his school books. He picked up his mental arithmetic.
“I’ll not study,” he said, as if he were answering some one, “but I just want to see if to-morrow’s lesson is hard.”
It began with,—
“If it takes four men three days to build five miles of stone wall, how much can one man build in a day?”
What a question! Johnny’s forehead puckered, he grasped the book as if he would pinch the answer out, and gradually slipped down on the sofa, until he came near joining the baby on the floor. Meanwhile, Master Phil, tired of feeding a horse who would not eat, began to wrestle with the table-cover, and a large Bible, which lay near the edge of the table, fell to the floor with a bang, narrowly missing the baby’s head.
Johnny sprang to his feet, thoroughly roused and frightened, for Phil, startled by the crash, and also expecting the “Naughty baby!” and little slap on his hands which always followed any unusual piece of mischief, burst into a roar, although he was quite unable to squeeze out a single tear.
But this Johnny was too much alarmed to notice, and, picking up the offender as if he had been made of glass, the amateur nurse felt him very carefully all over, to find out if any bones were broken!
When he came to the little sinner’s ribs, Phil made up his baby mind that he was being tickled instead of scolded, and roared again, but this time with laughter, in which Johnny could not help joining, though he was provoked both with his interesting charge and himself.
“You little rascal!” he said, catching Phil up, and rolling him on the sofa; “don’t you dare to wriggle off there till I straighten up the muss you’ve made—do you hear me?”
“Phil vely good boy now!” saying which, the baby folded his fat hands together, and actually sat still until the table was restored to order.
Johnny gave the whole of his mind to his business, after this, and when Mrs. Waring came back, she paused outside the window to look and listen, and she laughed as she had not laughed for many a day. For there was her “troublesome comfort,” on Johnny’s back, shouting and shrieking with laughter, while Johnny cantered up and down the room, rearing, bolting, plunging, and whinnying.
“I don’t know how to thank you enough, dear,” she said, gratefully, when she at last opened the door. “I’ve got my money, and bought all I shall need for three or four days, and the walk’s done me good, and you’ve given baby such a game of romps as he hasn’t had in a month of Sundays. Poor little soul, it goes to my heart to pen him up so, but how am I to help it? He’ll sleep like a top to-night, and so shall I. You tell your dear mother that I say she has a son to be proud of.”
Johnny colored high with pleasure, and plans for missionary work among unplayed-with babies began to flock into his mind. He said nothing of them, however, remembering, just in time, one of his father’s rules,—
“Never promise the smallest thing which you are not sure of being able to perform.”
So he only said, heartily,—
“I’m very glad if I’ve helped you, Mrs. Waring; he’s a jolly little chap, and it has really been good fun for both of us. But I ought to tell you—I began to study a little, when he seemed busy with his toys, and next thing I knew, he pulled off the table-cover and that large Bible, and it wasn’t my doings that it didn’t smash him!”
“Oh well, it didn’t! And a miss is as good as a mile,” said Mrs. Waring, cheerfully. She was so used to Phil’s hair-breadth escapes, that this one did not seem worth mentioning.
But Johnny went home, thinking at a great rate. Learning lessons was not wrong, nobody could say that it was. But it seemed that a thing good in itself could be made wrong, by being allowed to get out of place.
“It’s like what mamma said about ‘watching,’” he thought; “it isn’t that we must not ever do anything besides, but we mustn’t let anything ‘come between.’ If that little scamp had gone to sleep, now, it would have been no harm at all to pull my chair up to the sofa, so that he couldn’t roll off, and study till he woke. But he didn’t go to sleep!”
He had almost forgotten the base-ball match, and his brief, but very sharp feeling of disappointment. The “reward” is sure; not praise and petting, not the giving back to you that which you have foregone, but “the answer of a good conscience,” the “peace which the world cannot give,” the fresh strength which comes with every victory, however small, and which may, by God’s grace, be wrested even from defeat, when defeat is made the stepping-stone to conquest.
It was Sunday, and Jim was walking home from church with the Leslies. A gradual, but very great change had come over him since Taffy’s death. He had grown nearly as cheerful as he was before it happened, and did not seem to be exactly unhappy, but only the day before, Johnny had said to his mother,—
“I don’t think Jim can be well, mamma; he let slip the best kind of a chance for taking me off, the way he’s so fond of doing, this morning, and when I come to think of it, he hasn’t said any of those things for a good while.”
Mrs. Leslie smiled at Johnny’s conclusion; she did not think that was the reason, and she said,—
“He looks perfectly well, dear. He is growing fast, and so getting thinner, but I don’t see any signs of ill health about him.”
“There’s something about him,” said Johnny, in puzzled tones, “I never knew him to miss a chance of saying one of his sharp things, till lately; in fact, I used to think he was watching out for them!”
Johnny had not been mistaken in thinking so. Somebody has said that if we look to the very root of our ill-will against anyone, we shall find that it is envy; and though this does not, perhaps, always hold good, it certainly does in many instances. Ever since Jim had known Johnny, there had been in his heart an unacknowledged feeling of envy, of which he was himself only dimly aware. Why should Johnny have been given that safe, pleasant home, with a father and mother and sister of whom he could be both fond and proud, while he, Jim, was left to fight for even his daily bread, with no ready-made home and friends, such as most people had? For even among the boys with whom he was chiefly thrown, many had some place which they called home, and somebody who cared, were it ever so little, whether they lived or died. He persuaded himself that it was because Johnny was “foolish,” and “needed taking down” that he said disagreeable things to him, but, since Taffy died, he had, as he expressed it to himself, been “sorting himself out, and didn’t think much of the stock.”
His face, this morning, wore a troubled look, which Mrs. Leslie was quick to notice, but she had learned that, in dealing with Jim, she must use very much the same tactics that one uses in trying to tame some little wild creature of the woods—a sudden attack, or even approach, scared him off effectually; and although now he no longer ran, literally, as he had done at first, he would take refuge in silence, or an awkward changing of the subject.
She had stopped asking him to take meals with them, when she saw how it distressed him. He was painfully conscious of his want of training, and shrank from exposing it, and he was shrewd enough to know that there is no surer test of “manners” than behavior at the table.
But the evening visits, begun with the making of the gardens, and the reading and singing lessons, she had managed to have continued after the gardens were frostbitten, and the early nightfall made the evenings long. Yet even about this she had been obliged to exercise a great deal of tact and care. Jim had announced that the lessons were to end the moment there was no more work for him to do, and she knew that he meant what he said, so, after thinking a good deal, she appealed to Mr. Leslie for help.
“You don’t happen to want kindling-wood just now, perhaps?” he asked, after thinking a little.
“Don’t I?” she replied. “Why, we always want kindling-wood! I believe that fair kitchen-maid could burn ‘the full of the cellar,’ as she would put it, in a week, if she could get that much to burn.”
“Oh, well then,” said Mr. Leslie, cheerfully, “It’s all right. I happen to know where I can get a wagon load of pine logs and stumps, in comparison with which a ram’s horn is a ruler! I should think half a stump, or one log, an evening might be considered a fair allowance, and you shall have them before the gardens are done for, to make sure. You can explain to your muscular scholar that, by having a few days’ allowance chopped at a time, the reckless maiden can be kept within bounds. But Jim will have my sympathy when he comes to those stumps!”
“He will like it all the better for being so hard, I do believe,” replied Mrs. Leslie, and this proved to be true. When Jim had wrestled for half an hour with a stump which looked like a collection of buffaloes’ heads, he sat down to his lesson with calm satisfaction; no one could say that he had not earned it.
Mrs. Leslie had been very much pleased by his consent to share the Sunday evening talk—for it could scarcely be called a lesson—without offering to do anything in return, and, although he had always been respectfully attentive, she had noticed a growing interest and earnestness, since Taffy’s death, which made her feel very glad and hopeful.
She could not help thinking, to-day, as she glanced at Jim, of the great change in his appearance. He had bought a cheap, but neat and well-fitting suit of dark clothes, and he still wore the little black necktie. This suit he kept strictly for Sundays, except that he always brought the coat on his lesson evenings, and put it on when his chopping was done. He was very careful, now, to be clean and neat, even when he wore his old clothes.
Extraordinary patches and darns had taken the place of rents and holes, about which, formerly, he had neither thought nor cared. His face had always been honest and cheerful, and a new gentleness made it, now, very pleasant to look at. And he was growing tall. He had always been somewhat taller than Johnny, and now he overtopped him by a head, a fact which gave Johnny no satisfaction whatever. Mrs. Leslie bade Jim goodbye at the gate, with an allusion to their meeting in the evening, and he assured her that he was coming.
“Something is troubling Jim,” she said to the children, as they all went upstairs, “and I want very much, if I can do it without asking impertinent questions, to find out what it is. Perhaps we could help him.”
“You could, mamma dear,” said Johnny, “even if Tiny and I couldn’t. Jim’s queer; he doesn’t like to talk things out, the way I do—and I’ll tell you what, Tiny, I think you and I had better leave Jim alone with mamma a little while, when we’ve finished talking about our verses. He’d be much more apt to tell her if there were nobody else there.”
Mrs. Leslie kissed her boy very lovingly. He was growing in the grace of unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others, in a way that warmed her heart.
Jim brought a great bunch of wild roses to Mrs. Leslie, when he came that evening, and she thanked him warmly.
“I did not think they had come yet,” she said, “and I never feel as if summer were really here to stay until the roses come. Where did you find them, dear?”
Jim’s heavy face brightened for a moment. He saw that Mrs. Leslie had called him “dear” without knowing it—just as naturally as she said it to Johnny, and a wave of happy feeling went over his heart.
“Away out in the country, down a lane,” he said, “but I don’t know just where. I walked further than I’ve ever gone yet, this afternoon, straight out into the fields. I meant to go to church, but I felt full of walk, somehow, and as if my legs wouldn’t keep still, and I got to thinking, as I went along, and first thing I knew, I was about half a mile beyond the church! So I just kept right on, and I don’t see what folks live in cities for, anyhow—even little cities like this. I was under a big tree, lying on the grass, for an hour or so, and—”
Jim stopped suddenly, for want of words that exactly suited him.
Mrs. Leslie thanked him again for the roses, and Tiny ran to fill the “very prettiest” vase with water. And then they settled down to their talk about the Sunday-school lesson which they had all recited that morning. It was the story of Nicodemus; his “coming by night” to the Saviour, and hearing about the “new birth unto righteousness.”
For these Sunday evening talks, they always sat in the library, and, unless the evening was quite too warm, a little wood fire sparkled on the hearth, and no other light disputed its right to make the room cheerful. Tiny and Johnny had become skilful in building these little fires, in a way to make them give light, rather than warmth, so to-night, although the windows were open to the soft summer-twilight air, three or four pine-knots blazed upon the hearth, and sent dancing shadows about the room. Mrs. Leslie had noticed that, in this close companionship and half light, the reserve and restraint which sometimes tied Jim’s tongue seemed taken away.
The cause of the trouble which showed so plainly in his face came out by degrees, as the lesson was discussed.
“I felt somehow, when Taffy died,” he said, “as if I’d been walking the other way, and I’ve been trying to turn ’round, and travel towards where I hope he is. And I don’t mean, either, that I’ve been trying just by myself; I’ve been asking, you know, for help, and it seemed to me I got it, whenever I asked in dead earnest. And then, when I was going over the lesson for to-day, it seemed to mean that people who got religion got it all of a sudden, and didn’t want to do, or say, or think any of the bad things they’d been full of, any more, and down I went, right there, for no matter how I try, and ask, and mean, to keep straight, I don’t do it; in fact, it’s seemed to me lately, that the more I try the more I don’t, and—and—if it wasn’t for Taffy, and all of you, Mrs. Leslie, I’d just give the whole thing up, and try to forget it, and be comfortable! It’s too much to ask of anybody, if it’s that way!”
He spoke with increasing warmth, and in a curiously injured tone, almost as if he thought he had been deceived.
Mrs. Leslie laid her hand gently on his, saying,—
“Dear Jim, God never asks impossibilities. The new birth is the giving ourselves wholly to Him, the full surrender, keeping back nothing from His service. The other part, the making into His likeness, is always the work of a lifetime. And He knows that; He knows all we have to contend with. Don’t you remember—‘He knoweth whereof we are made, He remembereth that we are but dust’—so, while we must not make excuses for ourselves, beforehand, we may be very sure that, after every unwilling fall, He will help us up again, and freely forgive us.”
“But there’s something else”—and Jim’s face still looked cloudy—“I don’t see how it is, anyhow, that after we say we’ll be His, and try to do what we think He would like, He lets us fall. Couldn’t He keep us up, and keep us going, in spite of ourselves?”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Leslie, very solemnly, “that is the question which has puzzled and staggered God’s people for ages, or rather, the people who are only partly His. And there is no answer for it. All we know is just this, that there are two great powers abroad in the world, the power of God, and that of the devil; that if we choose God’s service and protection, He will join His mighty will to our weak ones, and that then we can be ‘more than conquerors,’ but that if we let go this stronghold, we are at the mercy of every sinful impulse and wicked desire. With His help, we may attain to strength, and victory, and peace, and if we do not, it is simply because we refuse this ‘ever-present help.’ And when we turn away from Him, when we withhold our allegiance, we never know how many others will be turned away by our example, nor how terribly we may be hindering the coming of God’s kingdom. Questioning and doubting are worse than useless; we are told that we shall ‘know hereafter,’ and where we place our love we may well place our trust. Now, I wish you to do something for me. I wish you to notice how those who are really, with heart and soul, following the Master are held above the things which other people count troubles and trials. There are too many who are only half-heartedly following, and how can these expect more than half a blessing? And one more thing; you have not yet confessed your allegiance. If you wished to be a soldier in your country’s army, what would be the very first thing for you to do?”
“Go to headquarters, and say so, and have my name put down,” said Jim, slowly and reluctantly.
“Yes. And that is the first thing, now. Own to the world that you are His, that you mean, with his help, to ‘fight manfully under his banner,’ and then He will ‘surely fulfil’ His part of the contract. Will you do this, dear?”
There was a breathless pause. Tiny’s hand stole into Jim’s on one side, Johnny’s on the other; Mrs. Leslie’s motherly hand was pressed lightly on his head. With a sudden burst of tears, he said, brokenly,—
“I will! I will! I knew I ought to, but the devil’s been putting me off with all this—this—” he stopped as suddenly as he had begun.
Mrs. Leslie rose and knelt, and the others knelt with her. Briefly and fervently she prayed for a blessing upon Jim’s resolve, and that he might be “strengthened with all might” to carry it out.
“Nothing is so dreadful as the want of love and faith,” she said, presently, “and against this you must fight and pray. Times will come to you, as they come to all of us, dear, when it must be just a sheer holding on to that which you have proved; but never, never listen to those who would take away your stronghold, and who offer less than nothing in exchange.”
Mrs. Leslie’s good-night kiss when he rose to go—the first kiss he could remember having received—seemed to him like a seal upon all that she had said. He felt brave, and strong, and free; the fears which had held him down were gone, and when, on the following Sunday afternoon, he took the vows of allegiance to the great Captain of our salvation, there was a ring of glad triumph in his strong young voice, as if, at the beginning of the battle, he saw the victor’s crown.