The superintendent brightened.
“Well, I certainly am thankful,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do with those little devils! They spoiled the whole service last Sunday. They had little tin pickles from some canning factory, and they sent them whizzing all over the room. One hit an old lady’s eye, and made no end of trouble. I’ll be grateful forever if you can see your way clear to taking them right on this afternoon.”
“Oh!” gasped Murray. “Really, I—you know—I—”
“Yes, I know what you’re going to say. You haven’t had any chance this week to study the lesson. They all say that the first time, but it doesn’t matter in the least. You can tell them a story, can’t you? You can at least keep them from raising a mob, or stealing the minister’s hat. I’m about at the end of my rope, so far as they are concerned. Perhaps I’m not giving them a very high recommendation, but I heard of you before you came, that you were keen on a hard job, so here it is! Will you come over and get acquainted with them? Let the lesson take care of itself. Anyhow they will teach it to you, if you ask questions. They are bright little chaps, if they are bad, and they’ve been well taught.”
It was a strange thing, perhaps the strangest of all the strange things that had yet happened to Murray Van Rensselaer, that fifteen minutes later he found himself sitting in front of a class of well-dressed, squirming, whispering lads who eyed him with a challenge, and prepared to “beat him to it,” as they phrased it.
What he was going to say to them, how he was going to hold them through the half-hour for which he was responsible for their actions, he did not know, but he certainly was not going to let seven kids beat him, and besides, had he not a reputation connected with his new name which he must keep up? He wasn’t going to be under suspicion because he could not bluff a good Sunday-school teacher’s line. That suggestion about letting the boys do the teaching had been a good thing. He would try that out.
During an interval when a hymn was announced, he overheard two of the boys talking about the football scores in the last night’s papers, and as soon as the superintendent announced that the classes would turn to the lesson, he collected the attention of his young hopefuls with one amazing off-hand question.
“You fellas ever see a big Army and Navy game?”
This, perhaps, was not the most approved method for opening a lesson in Acts, but it got them. The seven young imps as one man dropped the various schemes of torment which they had planned for this first Sunday with their new teacher, and leaned forward eagerly.
“Naw! D’jou?”