“No, I won’t; I’m playing hoss; you may just go round to the back gate.”
So the lady went round to the back gate, wetting her feet in the dewy grass. Tommy’s mother was quite surprised when the lady appeared suddenly before her kitchen window, where she was making cake, instead of ringing at the front door, as visitors always did; and when she found out how it was, she said again, “Did you ever?”
Tommy went on lashing his “hoss.”
Tommy was a great cry-baby; though he was very fond of plaguing other people, he was not quite so fond of being teazed himself; if a boy did but point at him, he would run screaming in to his mother like a mad bull, and she would hug him up, and wipe his great red face with her pocket-handkerchief, and give him a piece of frosted cake to comfort him.
“Did you ever?”
Well, you can imagine what sort of a man such a boy would make, when he grew up. When he was twenty, he got married, and brought his wife home to his mother’s to live; his father had been dead many years. Ah, then the poor old lady, his mother, reaped the bitter fruit of the seed she had sown. Tom ordered her round like a servant; sitting with his feet up in a chair, while she limped up-stairs and down to wait upon him. Poor old lady; she saw too late the sad mistake she had made; and how cruel had been her kindness to Tommy. By-and-by she died; Tom’s wife had been driven off long before by her husband’s bad conduct, and now he was all alone at the old farm-house. Then he was taken with a shocking rheumatism in all his limbs; he could not even so much as lift a finger to help himself; he had no friends now to come in and comfort him, because he had made all his acquaintances dislike him; he had nobody but the doctor, and “old Maggie,” whom he hired to come and make his tea, and there he lay on the bed groaning and swearing. Oh! it would chill your blood to hear him—you, whom I hope, never take the dear and holy name of God in vain. Nobody pitied him, because, they said, “he had been so bad.”
One Sunday Tom lay in bed groaning; the sun streamed in through the half-closed shutters, and the little motes were swimming round in the sunbeams; the window was partly open, and the scent of the clover blossoms and new-mown hay floated in on the summer air. Sabbath-school was over, for the little children were singing their parting hymn; and this was what they were singing:
“Abide with me! fast falls the eventide;
The darkness thickens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,