A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

"Thank God!"

Opening my eyes again with a great effort and looking up I beheld him, the old, burly country doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers on my wrist. But now a great emergency confronted me. My guardian angel, who has never ceased to be very high-church, urged me to meet it.

"William, William," I whispered, and felt his kiss answer me, "he must be baptized!"

"But he is dead, my darling!" he replied.

"Not really dead, William; he must be alive somewhere or I cannot bear it, and I cannot have him going where he will be, unbaptized."

So it was done, the doctor, the old woman and William standing around the little bier, and William saying the holy words himself. And there, high up on the mountain under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little itinerant, with his dust properly baptized, when they come on the last day to awaken and gather up those very least babies who died so soon they will not understand the resurrection call when they hear it.

After that we took more interest in the children. They seemed real to us and nearer, whereas, before, they had simply passed in and out before us like little irresponsible figureheads of the future, with whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it was curious, the way the innocent little things invariably hived there, no matter how awful and accusing the invitation would be—to those "dead in trespasses and sins, who felt themselves lost and undone."

So we began to be aware of the children as of strange young misguided angels in our midst, and it was a rigid test of the genuineness of William's character that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that there was something rancid about his piety, something cankered in his mercy-seat faculties. They are not higher critics, children are not, but they are infallible natural critics.

This brings me to tell of some of William's heavenly-mindedness in dealing with them. We were on a mountain circuit, the parsonage was in a little village, but there was no Sunday School there, nor in any of his churches. The people were poor and listless. The children knew nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often the case with the very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical acquaintance with Adam and Eve.

The thought of little children passing through the Christmas season without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings. He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the children received his confidences with apathy and silence.