“I call that a good piece of work, and I believe those wheels will run true as a die; you have learned something since Jonathan brought you to our door two years ago last fall; you couldn’t have made a sled stake then and made it right.”
“Indeed I have, grandfather, and I owe it to you, and I have often wondered that you should take so much pains with a strange boy, and as you may say an outcast, with neither kith nor kin.”
“I have tried to teach you some things, and chiefly those that would put you in the way of getting your bread in this country, and the things that I knew by experience to be both necessary and profitable to a young man going to take up land, which is the best, safest, and in my judgment, the happiest venture here. I have spent a great many hours teaching you to handle a rifle, for though playing with a gun is just time thrown away in an old settlement where there is nothing to shoot but sparrows and robins, my family would have often gone without a meal had it not been for my rifle; and the money that bought the greater part of this farm came by trapping and hunting. If I could not have handled tools I must have gone without cart or plough or harrow, for I had no money to buy, and must have gone nine miles to borrow.
“But there is one thing more necessary for you than anything I have ever tried to teach you, and I cannot teach it, I wish I could.”
“What is that, grandfather?”
“The grace of God, something that cannot be learned as you can learn to line and cut the shoulder of an axle-tree to make the wheel run true, or to work out a sum at school, and yet it is by all odds more necessary than any and all of the things you have learned here.”
“But you never told me anything about this before.”
“Perhaps you think it strange that when I have taken so much pains from the time you came here to teach you other things, and so many other things, that I have never said anything about that.”
“Yes, grandfather, I do.”
“It was because I didn’t think the time had come for me to speak. I knew you were becoming acquainted with the Scriptures, that you heard the gospel faithfully preached every Sabbath, and that you would not then have understood my talk, but now you know what I mean, do you not?”