“You must now lie down and rest,” kindly insisted Mrs. Brown. “I have a comfortable bed prepared for you in the adjoining room. Henry, my boy, will you show the way?”
Henry was a lad about ten years old. A look at his open, honest face at once prepossessed you in his favor. He immediately did what his mother desired.
“Mother,” said little blue-eyed Eliza, as soon as the stranger had disappeared, “who is this sick man, and what has he got in his satchel there in the corner?”
“Why, my dear child,” replied her mother, “you should never ask two questions at once. Answering your last question first, I do not know what is in the satchel, nor should my little girl be curious about that which does not concern her. As to the man, he is the missionary who traveled through here last week, trying to get up a Sunday-school in our neighborhood.”
“A Sunday-school, mother! School on Sunday! Why he must be a wicked man to keep school on Sunday! I don’t want to go.”
Her mother never having been in a Sunday-school herself, scarcely knew how to explain to her daughter the difference between it and an ordinary day school. So she simply said:
“It is not a school like ours down at the ‘Cross Roads,’ but one in which we read the Bible, and sing and pray, and are taught to love the Saviour.”
“O, mother!” exclaimed the child, “then I would like to go. Do tell the man to have one in our school-house. Will you mother?”
“Yes, child, I will ask him if he gets well again.”
“I hope he will get well soon,” said Eliza, and bounded off to tell Henry the news. He saw her coming, and as her manner showed that she was greatly pleased, he called out in one breath,