"No, sir; there is ever so much more to do."
"All right; it is dinner time now; you may go back to it after dinner." After dinner back he went; all the short afternoon he was not heard from, but just as Mr. Peters was deciding to call him again, he appeared.
"I've done my best, sir," he said, "and down at the very bottom of the box I found this." "This" was a five dollar gold piece.
"That's a queer place for gold," said Mr. Peters. "It's good you found it; well, sir, I suppose you will be on hand to-morrow morning?" This he said as he was putting the gold piece in his pocket-book.
After Crawford had said good-night and gone, Mr. Peters took the lantern and went slowly up the attic stairs. There was the long deep box in which the rubbish of twenty-five years had gathered. Crawford had evidently been to the bottom of it; he had fitted in pieces of shingle to make compartments, and in these different rooms he had placed the articles, with bits of shingle laid on top and labeled thus: "Good screws." "Pretty good nails." "Picture nails." "Small keys, somewhat bent." "Picture hooks." "Pieces of iron whose use I don't know." So on through the long box. In perfect order it was at last, and very little that could really be called useful, was to be found within it. But Mr. Peters as he bent over and read the labels, laughed gleefully and murmured to the mice: "If we are not both mistaken, I have found a boy, and he has found a fortune."
Sure enough; the sign disappeared from the window and was seen no more. Crawford became the well-known errand boy of the firm of Peters & Co. He had a little room neatly fitted up, next to the attic, where he spent his evenings, and at the foot of the bed hung a motto which Mr. Peters gave him.
"It tells your fortune for you, don't forget it," he said when he handed it to Crawford.
And the boy laughed and read it curiously: "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much."
"I'll try to be, sir," he said; and he never once thought of the long box over which he had been faithful.
All this happened years ago. Crawford Mills is errand boy no more, but the firm is Peters, Mills, Co. A young man and a rich man. "He found his fortune in a long box full of rubbish," Mr. Peters said once, laughing. "Never was a five dollar gold piece so successful in business as that one of his has been; it is good he found it." Then after a moment of silence he said gravely: "No, he didn't; he found it in his mother's Bible. 'He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much.' It is true; Mills the boy was faithful, and Mills the man we trust."