“Yes? Well, I thought so myself, but then I didn’t know how you would feel about it. It would seem hardly appropriate, now you think of it, for a room where men go to smoke and talk. Well, just all of you step around this side of the room, please, and I’ll show you another style of picture.”
They followed obediently, Mrs. Ketchum murmuring something more about the inappropriateness of the picture for a den, and the seven boys making the best of their way among the easels and over Mrs. Ketchum’s train. All but Margaret Manning. She lingered as if transfixed before the picture. Perhaps she had not even heard what Mrs. Ketchum had said. Two of the boys hoped so in whispers to one another.
“Say, Joe,” he whispered in a low grumble, “I forgot all about Mr. Stanley’s smoking. She——” with a nod toward the silent, pre-occupied woman still standing in front of the picture, “she won’t like that. Maybe he don’t do it any more. I don’t reckon ’twould be hard fer him to quit.”
Every one of those seven boys had given up the use of tobacco to please their teacher, Miss Manning.
Other pictures were forthcoming. There were landscapes and seascapes, flowers and animals, children and wood nymphs, dancing in extraordinary attitudes. The boys wondered that so many pictures could be made. They wondered and looked and grew weary with the unusual sight, and wished to go home and get rested, and did not in the least know which they liked. They were bewildered. Where was Miss Manning? She would tell them which to choose, for their part of the choice was a very important part to them, and in their own minds they were the principal part of the committee.
“SHE LINGERED AS IF TRANSFIXED BEFORE THE PICTURE.”
Miss Manning left the great picture by and by and came over to where the others sat, looking with them at picture after picture, hearing prices and painters discussed, and the merits of this and that work of art by Mrs. Ketchum and Mr. Talcut, whose sole idea of art was expressed in the price thereof, and who knew no more about the true worth of pictures than he knew about the moon. Then she left the others and wandered back to the quiet end of the room where stood that wonderful picture. There the boys one by one drifted back to her and sat or stood about her quietly, feeling the spell of the picture themselves, understanding in part at least her mood and why she did not feel like talking. They waited respectfully with uncovered heads, half bowed, looking, feeling instinctively the sacredness of the theme of the picture. Four of them were professed Christians, and the other three were just beginning to understand what a privilege it was to follow Christ.
Untaught and uncouth as they were, they took the faces for likenesses, and Christ’s life and work on earth became at once to them a living thing that they could see and understand. They looked at John and longed to be like him, so near to the Master and to receive that look of love. They knew Peter and thought they recognized several other disciples, for the Sunday-school lessons had been of late as vivid for them as mere words can paint the life of Christ. They seemed themselves to stand within the heavy arch of stone over that table, so long ago, and to be sitting at the table, his disciples, some of them unworthy, but still there. They had been helped to this by what Miss Manning had said the first Sunday she took the class, when the lesson had been of Jesus and of some talks he had had with his disciples. She had told them that as there were just twelve of them in the class she could not help sometimes thinking of them as if they were the twelve disciples, especially as one of them was named John and another Andrew, and she wanted them to try to feel that these lessons were for them; that Jesus was sitting there in their class each Sabbath speaking these words to them and calling them to him.