"For a what?" exclaimed Marion in surprise, turning the wheel for him to step in beside her.
"For a text for my Easter sermon," he explained as they drove on in the warm April sunshine. "Ah, I see, Miss Polly, you have not discovered the school of philosophers that centres around the Cross-Roads store. Well, it's not to be wondered at; few people do. I spent a winter in Rome, when I was younger, and one of my favourite walks was up on the Pincian Hill. The band plays in the afternoons, you know, and tourists flock to see the queen drive by. There is a charming view from the summit—the dome of St. Peters against the blue Italian sky, the old yellow Tiber crawling along under its bridges from ruin to ruin, and the immortal city itself, climbing up its historic hills. And on the Pincio one meets everybody,—soldiers and courtiers, flower girls and friars, monks in robes of every order, and pilgrims from all parts of the world.
"The first time I was on the hill, as I wandered among the shrubbery and flowers, I noticed a row of moss-grown pedestals set along each side of the drive for quite a distance. Each pedestal bore the weather-beaten bust of some old sage or philosopher or hero.
"They made no more impression on my mind then, than so many fence-posts, but later I found a workman repairing the statuary one day. He had put a new nose on the mutilated face of an old philosopher, and that fresh white nasal appendage, standing out jauntily in the middle of the ancient gray visage, was so ludicrous I could not help smiling whenever I passed it. I began to feel acquainted with the old fellow, as day after day that nose forced my attention. Sometimes, coming upon him suddenly, the only familiar face in a city full of strangers, I felt that he was an old friend to whom I should take off my hat. Then it became so that I rarely passed him without recalling some of his wise sayings that I had read at college. Many a time he and his row of stony-eyed companions were an inspiration to me in that way.
"It was so that I met these men at the Cross-Roads. They scarcely claimed my attention at first. Then one day I heard one of them give utterance to a time-worn truth in such an original way that I stopped to talk to him.
"Trite as it was, he had hewn it himself out of the actual experiences of his own life. It was the result of his own keen observation of human nature. Set as it was in his homely, uncouth dialect, it impressed me with startling force. Then I listened to his companions, and found that they, too, were sometimes worthy of pedestals. Unconsciously to themselves they have often given me suggestions for my sermons. Ah, it's a pity that the backwoods has no Pincio on which to give its philosophers to posterity!"
Half an hour later as they drove homeward, Marion glanced at her companion. "No text this time," she laughed, breaking the reverie into which the old minister had fallen. "Your sages said nothing but 'good morning, sir,' and there wasn't a single suggestion of Easter in the whole store, except the packages of egg dyes, and some impossible little chocolate rabbits. Oh, yes,—those two little boys playing on the doorstep. Tommy Bowser had evidently taken time by the forelock and sampled his father's dyes, for he had a whole hatful of coloured eggs, and was teaching that little Perkins boy how to play 'bust.' He was an apt scholar, for while I watched he won five of Tommy's eggs and never cracked his own. You should have seen them."
"Oh, I saw them," said the minister, with a smile. "It was those same little lads who suggested the text for my Easter sermon."
Marion gave a gasp of astonishment. "Would you mind telling me how?" she exclaimed.