Do you remember what Pharaoh’s daughter said when, winning that strange prize from the bulrushes, on the Nile; she called to the woman whose child might have perished?
Pharaoh’s daughter said to the mother: “Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages,” and that message is given as the crown of all motherhood on whom the divine mercy falls today. There comes this same message: “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will pay the thy wages.”
The good that you have done you shall know, “not here, but hereafter.”
We should never forget that the best and truest lives are those who strew all the years with the sweet aroma of loving and self-sacrificing deeds. Did you ever go, in summer, to the great marshes of our fresh-water lakes, and in the little bayous, where the muck and grasses are so thick it is difficult to even row a boat? If not, it will pay you to go. You find the white water lilies, dotted here and there all over this forsaken waste. They take root and grow silently amid the slime and mud in the quiet waters, until, in mid-summer, they open their creamy beauty to the persuasion of the sunshine, the glory and idealization of all flowers. So amid the lowest and poorest of humanity, among its shadows and mists, we can sow, day by day, our small seeds of gentle and generous deeds, not knowing when they take root, or expecting to ever behold their unfolding into the blossoms on the great river of time.
To have a perfect government we must have a perfect people, and that cannot be accomplished unless we educate, unless we train, our boys in the right direction. If we do our share in this generation it will be easier for those who follow.
The more you mingle among newsboys the easier it is to learn how to influence and guide them in the right path.
They will open out to you a world you have never found, a world full of sunshine. If you are inclined to serve these boys, and are willing to try to teach them how to live right, you will build for yourself a crown of happiness in this world that all the wealth of a nation cannot purchase.
PASTIME—THE FINISH.