The Bishop's Shadow

by I. T. Thurston

Tode pondered this unpalatable statement with a clouded face.

"But what ye goin' to do when some other feller cuts up rough with ye?"

"Find some other way to get even with him."

"But I don't see--what other way is there 'cept hittin' him a harder one'n he gives you?"

Mr. Scott opened his Bible again and pointed to the last two verses of the twelfth chapter of Romans.

Tode went home that day with his mind in a tumult. These new ideas did not suit him at all. A "word and a blow," and the blow first had been his method of settling such questions heretofore, and it seemed to him far the better way.

He took a roundabout route home, for he did not want to see Nan until he had thought out this matter to his own satisfaction. To help people poorer or weaker than himself, or to "keep straight" himself, and help others to do likewise--this was one thing. To meekly submit to ill treatment and "take a blow" from a fellow whom he "could whip with his little finger"--this was quite another and, to one of Tode's temperament, a far more distasteful thing.

The boy had reached no conclusion when he finally went home to supper. He was silent and thoughtful all the evening, but it was not until the following day that he spoke of the matter to Nan.

Nan listened in perplexed silence to what he had to say. She had been well taught while her mother lived, but she had never given these subjects any real, deep thought, as Tode was doing now. She began to feel that this rough, untaught street boy was likely to get far ahead of her if he should keep on pondering over questions like this. Even now she could give him but little help.

Seeing this, Tode took up his Testament again, and read on and on until he had finished the book of Matthew, and gained a pretty clear idea of the life and death of Jesus the Christ. There was much, of course, that he did not understand at all. Many of the words and expressions conveyed no meaning to him, but yet he gathered enough to understand, in a measure, what that Life was, and he began dimly to realise why the bishop gave so much of his time and thought to God's poor. The boy pondered these things in his heart, and a new world seemed to open before him.