“Now, take my word, Dick, it isn’t half so hard as ’tis to toe Satan’s crooked ones; and besides, my Master helps his servants; he don’t call them servants, he calls them children. Only think! the great God, who made heaven and earth, letting us call him Father, hearing us when we pray, and promising to help us over all the hard places. Why, Dick, he would even help you get your lessons.”
Dick shook his head unbelievingly.
“But I’ve tried him,” continued Aunty McFane, earnestly. “I’ve tried him more than fifty years. He says he numbers the hairs of our heads, and there can’t be anything littler than that. And then he sent his only Son to die for us. We hadn’t done as the Master, who knew better than we, had told us to do, and so Jesus came to ‘save us’ from our sins. Does your master make any such way for you out of trouble? Which do you think is the best one to follow, Dick? because you can’t serve both; you must choose.”
Dick made no reply, and Aunty McFane, too wise to spoil what she had said by saying too much, closed her eyes as if to sleep. I think, way down in her heart, she was asking God to bless the poor boy and help him to choose then. By and by, laying one hand suddenly on his shoulder, she quietly said, “What would have become of you, Dick, if God hadn’t sent little Maybee here that day?”
Dick buried his face in his pillows and burst into tears.
VII.
TOD’S STRATAGEM.
“The God that answereth by fire, let him be God.”
“Come here, you little toad! Before I would play girl-plays the whole time!” cried Joe Travers, one of the big boys, to our little friend Tod, who was running as mail-agent between two of the pretty play-houses under the old oak.
Tod dropped the brown paper mail-bag as if it had burned him, and looked around. Maybee’s sharp little tongue was buzzing away in the farthest corner of the playground. Sue was busily “setting table.”