“Oh! I don’t know that I can tell much about it. It used to be a very bad neighbourhood where old Strong lives, and the neighbours used to bother him awfully. And that wasn’t the worst. He has a very bad temper naturally, and he got into trouble all round when he first lived there. And one day he heard some of them laughing at him and his religion, saying there was no difference between Christians and other people. And they didn’t stop there, but scoffed at the name of our Lord, and at the Bible. It all happened down at Hunt’s Mills, and they didn’t know that Mr Strong was there; and when he rose up from the corner where he had been sitting all the time, and came forward among them, they were astonished, and thought they were going to have great fun. But they didn’t that time. Mr Hunt told papa all about it. He just looked at them and said: ‘God forgive you for speaking lightly that blessed name, and God forgive me for giving you the occasion.’ And then he just turned and walked away.
“After that it didn’t matter what they said or did to him, he wouldn’t take his own part. They say that for more than a year he didn’t speak a word to a man in the neighbourhood where he lives; he couldn’t trust himself. But he got a chance to do a good turn once in a while, that told better than words. Once he turned some stray cattle out of John Jarvis’s grain, and built up the fences when there was no one at Jarvis’s house to do it. That wouldn’t have been much—any good neighbour would have done as much as that, you know. But it had happened the day before that the Jarvis’s boys had left down the bars of his back pasture, and all his young cattle had passed most of the night in his own wheat. It was not a place that the boys needed to go to, and it looked very much as if they had done it on purpose. They must have felt mean when they came home and saw old Strong building up their fence.”
Then Jem took up the word.
“And once, some of those fellows took off the nut from his wagon, as it was standing at the store door, and the wheel came off just as he was going down the hill by the bridge; and if it hadn’t been that his old Jerry is as steady as a rock the old man would have been pitched into the river.”
“The village people took that up, and wanted him to prosecute them. But he wouldn’t,” said David. “It was a regular case of ‘turning the other cheek.’ Everybody wondered, knowing old Strong’s temper.”
“And once they sheared old Jerry’s mane and tail,” said Jem. “And they say old Strong cried like a baby when he saw him. He wouldn’t have anything done about it; but he said he’d be even with them some time. And he was even with one of them. One day when he was in the hayfield, Job Steele came running over to tell him that his little girl had fallen in the barn and broken her arm and hurt her head, and he begged him to let him have Jerry to ride, for the doctor. Then Mr Strong looked him right in the face, and said he, ‘No, I can’t let you have him. You don’t know how to treat dumb beasts. I’ll go myself for the doctor.’ And sure enough, he unyoked his oxen from the cart, though it was Saturday and looked like rain, and his hay was all ready to be taken in, and went to the pasture for Jerry, and rode to the village himself, and let the doctor have his horse, and walked home.”
“And did he know that it was Job Steele who had ill-treated his horse,” asked Frank.
“He never said so to anybody; and Job never acknowledged it. But other people said so, and Job once told papa that Mr Strong’s way of doing ‘good for evil,’ was the first thing that made him think that there must be something in religion; and Mr Steele is a changed character now.”
“And how did it all end with Mr Strong?” asked Frank, much interested.
“Oh, it isn’t ended yet,” said David. “Mr Strong is fighting against his bad temper as hard as ever. It has ended as far as his trouble with his neighbours is concerned. He made them see there is something in religion more than they thought, as Job Steele said, and there is no more trouble among them. But the old man must have had some pretty hard battles with himself, before it came to that.”