TED’S TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.
A TRUE STORY.
BY AN ATLANTA TEACHER
Between you and me Ted isn’t his real name, but, since I cannot tell you the name which his father and mother gave him, I suppose Ted will do for a boy as well as anything else. The fact is I do not want that you should think so much of the name as of the boy; for I assure you Ted is a boy worth thinking about, even if he is only nine years old, and if he hasn’t a very great superabundance (Did you ever see or hear such a big word?) of money, and doesn’t own a horse, nor a dog, nor a velocipede, nor a bicycle, nor a hundred other things that money will buy. I can tell you though that Ted has ever so many things that money—no, not all the money that Vanderbilt, nor Jay Gould, nor any other man has—can not buy. I mean Ted’s father and mother and two little brothers, and a cunning little sister with eyes like stars, and cheeks like a peach-blossom, and a mouth like a ripe cherry. Then Ted knows a good deal about ever so many things. Of course he got a great deal of this knowledge from his father and mother, as any boy can who has a good father and mother, and what is a boy going to do who hasn’t both?
Ted knows the men and women in the Bible just like a book; better too. He knows them just as well as he does the people living around him, and he can go to the map and find all those places mentioned in the New Testament.
The father, and mother, and Ted, and the little sister (I wish I might tell you her name), made that map, and some day, perhaps, I shall tell you how they did it. Ted’s baby brother, two years old, can name some of the places, too, though Ted says it is very hard for him to say Cappadocia, and I think it is no wonder, for that is a dreadful word for a child to say.
Well, as I said before, Ted has all these rich possessions of family friends and knowledge, and better than all, he has, I think, the love of God in his heart just as earnest, and true, and tender as if he were a grown-up man. I do not think that one has to wait to be a grown-up person to love God, do you?
Because of this love, Ted has a great love for human beings, and wants to do all he can to help them, and make them better. He knows that he is a small boy, and cannot do a man’s work, but he does not sit down and say he will wait till he is a man, but he does a little boy’s work as well as he can. Now I will tell you what he has done within the last few months. He has formed a temperance society, and ever so many little boys and girls have joined it.
No one can be a member of this society until he has promised not to drink beer, nor egg-nog, nor anything that has alcohol in it, and he must say he will not use tobacco, nor swear, nor say bad words of any kind.
The way he began was, one day a little boy came into the yard, I mean Ted’s father’s yard, to split wood. He was just a little fellow, not much larger, I believe, than Ted himself, and, if you can believe me, he was smoking!
Of course Ted was shocked, and he thought it must be stopped, so he talked to the little boy, and after some persuasion got him to promise not to touch tobacco again, and that was Ted’s society. Well, the little boy began to help Ted to persuade other little boys to join the society. And so they found plenty. You see there are ever so many people everywhere ready to be good and wise if they only had some one to show them how. So it came about that one after another the little boys went to Ted’s house to sign the pledge. Ted’s mother, who is one of those mothers that can be in many ways a great comfort to a boy, helped about getting cards for the children, and bits of blue ribbon to wear as a sign that they belonged to Ted’s society.
Well, little girls began to join too. Of course Ted’s little sister did so the first of all, for she does not like to be behind her brother in doing right things, and then other little girls came. Why, one evening I went to Ted’s house, and there were seven little people who had just been in to sign the pledge. Of course they carried a great deal of mud into the house. (It is a very muddy place where Ted lives. Oh, my! Sometimes I think there is more mud than anything else there.)
Ted, and his mother and father, were there, looking just as happy as if nothing could make them so glad as to have the carpet all covered with muddy prints of little shoes; but I do not think they were so very glad about the mud as they were to see that the small attempt to do good promised to become a great work, and that, with God’s blessing, Ted might be the means of helping those little boys and girls to become good men and women.
Ted has more than one hundred little people in his society now, and he still keeps working to get in more.
I think I forgot to tell you that Ted lives among the colored people in the South, and that his society consists of colored children; but, never mind, isn’t it just as good to know it now, as if I told you at first?
Yes, his father and mother are missionaries, and if it were not such a large name to give a little boy, I should say that Ted is a missionary too.