“There was a poor woman who had a good little girl named May-Flower; and one day a fairy brought May-Flower a cow, and told her to milk it. She milked the cow, and it gave milk enough to fill all the dishes and pans in the house; and yet the milk still ran, so that there was no end of it. And that one cow made that woman the richest person on the island where she lived.”
Alfred’s mamma had been listening to Rupert’s stories. When he stopped, she smiled and said,
“I think Alfred can match that story.”
“How, mamma? O, I know! Elijah went once to a poor woman, and asked her for a piece of bread, when there was a great famine in the land. The woman had only ‘a handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse;’ but that handful of meal never grew any less, or the oil either, until God sent rain to put an end to the famine.”
“Yes, Alfred, that is a match to Rupert’s story: but do not you recollect another miracle, which is quite as wonderful as the story of the cow which gave so much milk?”
Alfred did not, at first, understand what his mamma wanted him to remember, until she said,
“What did the prophet Elisha do for the poor widow whose husband feared God, when they were going to make slaves of her two sons?”
“O, he made one pot of oil fill all the vessels that were in the house; and the woman sold the oil, and paid her debts with it, and then had enough money left for herself and her sons to live upon.”[[1]]
[1]. See frontispiece.
“Well, those are nice stories,” said Rupert. “I did not know before that there were any such in the Bible.”