It was a pleasant room, with pictures on the walls, and prettily coloured screens stood at hand, by which the classes would be partitioned off from each other when the teaching began. But first the superintendent, standing on a small platform at the end of the room, gave out a hymn, which was sung, and then he prayed.
The prayer was not a comfortable time for Gus. First he received a kick, and then a sharp pinch on the arm; and then some one inflicted on him the peculiar torture which is caused by seizing a single hair growing on a person's head, and tugging it out by one mighty pull. In vain Gus tried to discover and avenge himself on his persecutors. The boys were too quick for him, and all alike presented a devout appearance the instant he turned.
When the class began to read the lesson, it appeared that Gus, despite his poverty-stricken aspect, could read as well as any boy present, and better than some of them could. The teacher praised his reading, and the boys did not like him the better in consequence. Soon the young lady perceived the treatment to which Gus was being slyly subjected.
"For shame, boys!" she said. "Is that the way to treat a stranger? I am really ashamed. And I hoped I was going to make gentlemen of you."
Gus looked up quickly. Perhaps it was his vivid look of interest which made her say the next moment:
"Now tell me, what is a gentleman?"
The answers were various. One boy said that a gentleman was a rich man; another that he was one who knew a great deal; and a third suggested that he was one who had good manners. He, the teacher told him, was nearest to the truth.
"Because," said she, "truly good manners spring from a good heart. No one who acts unkindly to another, no one who takes advantage of the weak and helpless, no one who cheats and lies, is a gentleman. It is the gentle heart that makes the gentleman. Love is the law of his life. Oh, boys, the truest gentleman that ever lived was the Lord Jesus Christ, and you must follow His example if you would deserve the name of gentleman."
Gus listened eagerly. This was the kind of gentleman his father had wished him to be. Dick was altogether wrong.
There was at least one attentive scholar in the school that afternoon—one who missed no word that his teacher spoke of the love and graciousness of the Lord Jesus Christ; one to whom the Gospel story was not entirely new, but who saw for the first time that day what the story meant for him.