“‘Every one of us, and all the time,’” answered his mother. “‘His eyes are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.’ But that need not trouble you, if you do right.”
“But I don’t do right, you know, mamma, always, and I don’t believe I can if I try ever so hard. I get tired being good too. I want to play and have fun.”
“‘Tired being good,’ my child. It is the only way to be happy. I know a little boy who is happy all day long, and all he has to make him so, is ‘being good.’ I am going to take something to his sick mother this evening, and you may go with me.”
“Is it the little lame boy, mamma, that lives down by the paper-mill? Oh, won’t that be nice! and may I take him one of my books to read?” Frankie asked eagerly.
His mother helped him choose a book, and, after tea, they started. Their way led them along the bank of the creek. The sun was just setting and all the sunset colors were reflected in the water. The hush of the Sabbath was on the busy, noisy village, and nothing could be heard but the faint hum of insects and the good-night song of the birds. Walking by his mother’s side, with his hand in hers, all these pleasant sights and sounds around them, and in his heart the thought of pleasing poor, lame Aleck,—all these made Frankie quietly happy. Looking up into his mother’s face, he said, “God is looking at us now, mamma, and I ain’t afraid. I wish I could see him too.”
“If you love and obey God, Frankie, you will see him, for when you die, He will take you to heaven, to live with him forever.” This and much more his mother said, and Frankie listened and pondered her words in his childish heart.
At last they reached the widow’s little brown house at the foot of a steep, wood-covered hill. It was a “wee sma’ place,” as widow Espey said, but “didna they hae a’ the bonny world outside?”
The sick woman was lying on a clean white bed in one corner of the room. Her face was pale and thin, but the light of a sweet content shone through her eyes. The lame boy, Aleck, was sitting by the bed, his crutches lying on the floor beside him. He had his mother’s face, and the same patient, happy look.
“We have been talkin’, my bairn an’ I, o’ the guid land on the ither side,” the widow said, after her visitors were seated. “I dinna ken the time, but it wi’ nae’ be lang before I sha’ gang awa’ to my ain countrie.”
Tears came into Aleck’s eyes and rolled down his thin, white cheeks.