"Yes," said the clergyman, smiling; "shall we thank Him, Christie?"
So he knelt down by Christie's bed, and little Christie clasped his thin hands and added his words of praise:—
"O Jesus, I thank Thee so much for letting me have some work to do for Thee; and, please, I will stay outside the gates a little longer, to do something to show Thee how I love Thee. Amen."
"Yes, Christie," said the clergyman, as he rose to go, "you must work with a very loving heart. And when the work is over will come the rest. After the long waiting will come 'Home, sweet Home.'"
"Yes," said Christie, brightly, "'there's no place like Home, no place like Home.'"
CHAPTER XIII.
CHRISTIE'S WORK FOR THE MASTER.
It was a hot summer's afternoon, some years after, and the air in Ivy Court was as close and stifling as it had been in the days when Christie and old Treffy lived there. Crowds of children might still be seen playing there, screaming and quarrelling, just as they had done then. The air was as full of smoke and dust, and the court looked as desolate as it had done in those years gone by. It was still a very dismal and a very forlorn place.
So Christie thought, as he entered it that sultry day; it seemed to him as far as ever from "Home, sweet Home." Yet, of all the places which he visited as a Scripture-reader, there was no place in which Christie took such an interest as Ivy Court. For he could not forget those dreary days when he had been a little homeless wanderer, and had gone there for a night's lodging. And he could not forget the old attic which had been the first place, since his mother's death, that he had been able to call home. It was to this very attic he was going this afternoon. He climbed the rickety stairs, and as he did so he thought of the night when he had crept up them for the first time, and had knelt down outside old Treffy's door, listening to the organ. Christie had never parted with that organ, his old master's last gift to him. And scarcely a week passed that he did not turn the handle, and listen to the dear old tunes. And he always finished with "Home, sweet Home," for he still loved that tune the best. And when Miss Mabel came to see him, she always wanted to turn the old organ in remembrance of her childish days. She was not Miss Mabel any longer now, though Christie still sometimes called her so when they were talking together of the old days, and of Treffy and his organ. But Mabel was married now to the clergyman under whom Christie was working, and she took great interest in the young Scripture-reader, and was always ready to help him with her advice and sympathy. And she would ask Christie about the poor people he visited, and he would tell her which of them most needed her aid. And where she was most needed young Mrs. Villiers was always ready to go.