"I don't see Dave reading his Bible much," he said to himself; "and I don't believe he cares very much about prayer--acts that way, at any rate. I should like to help him; but how?"
He called Dave before his mind, this brown-haired, blue-eyed boy, with his quiet manners and methods, but, as the keeper put it, "loaded with a lot of grit."
"Yes, I should like to help that boy," continued the keeper in his thoughts. "I would like to influence him to be a Christian; but how, I wonder? He is one of that kind of self-reliant chaps you feel that he had rather find out a thing himself than be told of it. He doesn't want me, I know, to tell him all the time about his duty, and yet--yet--I should like to influence him, and I wonder how?"
Of course, there was one's example first of all.
"Try to do what I can here," thought the keeper. "I might speak to him, though I don't want to run the thing into the ground. Well, I shall be guided."
The thought came to him, "Now there is a bit of a thing I can do which certainly won't do harm."
The thought was just to leave his Bible open on the kitchen table.
"Perhaps he may see a verse," thought the keeper, "and it will set him to thinking."
After that on the table would lie the keeper's Bible turned back to some impressive chapter. Dave would have been uneasy if in contact with some styles of religion, but such a kindly natured, sunny, generous, and tolerant soul as Toby Tolman he could not find disagreeable. Toby's religion was never obtrusive, never unpleasantly in the way of people; though always prominent, out in open sight, it was the prominence of the sunshine, of a bird's happy singing, of nature on a spring morning. Dave felt it, but he was a silent lad over important subjects. He was different from his sister Annie. If her soul were stirred by any profound emotion, she must in some way give expression to it. Dave, though, would look very serious and continue silent. His mother, who knew him so well, said that Dave felt most when he said the least, and the hours of his greatest stillness were to her the surest signs of an intense activity within.
"Dave is fullest when he seems to be emptiest," Mrs. Fletcher would say. Because now-a-days at the light he would often have long seasons of silence, was it any sign of mental occupation?