Mrs. Leslie rose and knelt, and the others knelt with her. Briefly and fervently she prayed for a blessing upon Jim’s resolve, and that he might be “strengthened with all might” to carry it out.
“Nothing is so dreadful as the want of love and faith,” she said, presently, “and against this you must fight and pray. Times will come to you, as they come to all of us, dear, when it must be just a sheer holding on to that which you have proved; but never, never listen to those who would take away your stronghold, and who offer less than nothing in exchange.”
Mrs. Leslie’s good-night kiss when he rose to go—the first kiss he could remember having received—seemed to him like a seal upon all that she had said. He felt brave, and strong, and free; the fears which had held him down were gone, and when, on the following Sunday afternoon, he took the vows of allegiance to the great Captain of our salvation, there was a ring of glad triumph in his strong young voice, as if, at the beginning of the battle, he saw the victor’s crown.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE WRONG END.
There was no doubt about it—Johnny had, to use one of his own expressions, “got up wrong end foremost,” that morning. Not that he had really and literally come out of bed upon his head instead of his feet; that would not have mattered at all, for he would have been right end up again in a minute. No, it was much worse than that, for the plain English of it was, that he was in a very bad humor, and did not know it!
What he thought he knew was, that everything went wrong. The fire had gone out in the furnace, the night before, and his room, although by no means freezing cold, was uncomfortably chilly. A button snapped off his new school jacket as he was dressing; the bell rang before he was quite ready, and he had intended, lately, to be punctual at every meal, “really and truly”; it was one of the ways in which, without saying anything about it, he was trying to do right.
He was only a moment or two late, after all; the rest of the family had only just sat down, and he was in time for grace, but he felt “flustered.” He was ashamed to grumble aloud when he found the smoking brown batter-cakes were “only flannel-cakes,” instead of his favorite buckwheats, but his face certainly grumbled.