CHILDREN'S PAGE.
LAME JOE.
MISS M. WATERBURY, POLO, ILL.
We were teaching a Freedman's school in Mississippi, and boarding with a Northern family on a plantation, where a few years before were four hundred slaves. One Sabbath morning we were sitting on the back piazza, sorting Sunday-school papers for the school, which was that day to begin, when Joe made his appearance from the kitchen, coming along by the porch with a limping, shuffling gait; his only garments a shirt much too large for him and minus one sleeve, and a pair of pants hanging in tatters, the cast-off rags of an older brother. "Can you read, Joe?" said the teacher, passing him a paper full of pictures. "Not yit, ma'am; but brother Ben can read right smart, and he's gwine to teach me a heap o' larnin', and I reckon I'se goin' to read dis yere some time shore." Joe took his first lesson in learning by means of the word method, and limped off spelling the word "so," and picking out all the so's in his paper.
In a few days we took occasion to interview his mother and broach the subject of his going to school; but we soon found that the chances were against him; for being the youngest of ten children, there were so many to feed and clothe, as his mother expressed it, she "couldn't get to him," and he had to tote wood and water for her, while she cooked at the big house. After repeated attempts to get Joe started in his education, the Yankee school ma'am set about clothing her protégé, but was soon put to her wits' end to find a pattern for boys' pants; and as tailoring was not her forte, there were several obstacles to be overcome. Happily, a plan was hit upon, and Joe pulled off his dilapidated pants and went to bed, while his new clothes were cut by the use of the old ones for a pattern, and very soon the happiest boy of the Ethiopian race was a daily attendant at the school. A week or two of study passed, when the gentleman who had provided Joe with hat and book accosted him with, "How do you get on, Joe?" "Mighty well, Colonel; done got past the picture o' de ox; have shore done got past him!"
No pupil was more constant in attendance than our protégé, and with rapid strides he passed the boys of his age, learning well whatever he was permitted to study, and in four years from the time he learned his first word on the piazza, we left him doing examples in higher mathematics, before a large audience of parents and friends of education, who were delighted at his progress. Many of our pupils had come to the Good Shepherd, and with delight told of the joy in following their newly-found Saviour; but Joe was so engrossed with study, nothing seemed to move him, and we left him, a little saddened that he was, as he expressed it, "yet in the outstanding army."
This summer, while the yellow fever was prevailing, there came a postal from Joe, saying he had found Jesus, and taken Him for the captain of his salvation; and now he loved everybody, and his teachers better than ever, and amidst all the fears about the fever he never was afraid; he was well, though his father and mother were both sick; but he didn't have any fears for this world or the next.