IVORY BOYNTON had taken the horse and gone to the village on an errand, a rare thing for him to do after dark, so Rod was thinking, as he sat in the living-room learning his Sunday-School lesson on the same evening that the men were gossiping at the brick store. His aunt had required him, from the time when he was proficient enough to do so, to read at least a part of a chapter in the Bible every night. Beginning with Genesis he had reached Leviticus and had made up his mind that the Bible was a much more difficult book than “Scottish Chiefs,” not withstanding the fact that Ivory helped him over most of the hard places. At the present juncture he was vastly interested in the subject of “rods” as unfolded in the book of Exodus, which was being studied by his Sunday-School class. What added to the excitement was the fact that his uncle's Christian name, Aaron, kept appearing in the chronicle, as frequently as that of the great lawgiver Moses himself; and there were many verses about the wonder-working rods of Moses and Aaron that had a strange effect upon the boy's ear, when he read them aloud, as he loved to do whenever he was left alone for a time. When his aunt was in the room his instinct kept him from doing this, for the mere mention of the name of Aaron, he feared, might sadden his aunt and provoke in her that dangerous vein of reminiscence that made Ivory so anxious.
“It kind o' makes me nervous to be named 'Rod,' Aunt Boynton,” said the boy, looking up from the Bible. “All the rods in these Exodus chapters do such dreadful things! They become serpents, and one of them swallows up all the others: and Moses smites the waters with a rod and they become blood, and the people can't drink the water and the fish die! Then they stretch a rod across the streams and ponds and bring a plague of frogs over the land, with swarms of flies and horrible insects.”
“That was to show God's power to Pharaoh, and melt his hard heart to obedience and reverence,” explained Mrs. Boynton, who had known the Bible from cover to cover in her youth and could still give chapter and verse for hundreds of her favorite passages.
“It took an awful lot of melting, Pharaoh's heart!” exclaimed the boy. “Pharaoh must have been worse than Deacon Baxter! I wonder if they ever tried to make him good by being kind to him! I've read and read, but I can't find they used anything on him but plagues and famines and boils and pestilences and thunder and hail and fire!—Have I got a middle name, Aunt Boynton, for I don't like Rod very much?”
“I never heard that you had a middle name; you must ask Ivory,” said his aunt abstractedly.
“Did my father name me Rod, or my mother?'
“I don't really know; perhaps it was your mother, but don't ask questions, please.”
“I forgot, Aunt Boynton! Yes, I think perhaps my mother named me. Mothers 'most always name their babies, don't they? My mother wasn't like you; she looked just like the picture of Pocahontas in my History. She never knew about these Bible rods, I guess.”
“When you go a little further you will find pleasanter things about rods,” said his aunt, knitting, knitting, intensely, as was her habit, and talking as if her mind were a thousand miles away. “You know they were just little branches of trees, and it was only God's power that made them wonderful in any way.”
“Oh! I thought they were like the singing-teacher's stick he keeps time with.”