He tried to make him feel that he was his friend; tried to rouse him to want to be a man, and to overcome his grave faults. "You are just the age of my boy Harris," Rosie heard her father say, "and he is just about your size. Harris is a grand boy; he never gave his mother an hour of anxiety, and I can trust him anywhere. I have such faith in his word that when he says a thing, I do not have to inquire into it, I know it is true. Isn't it worth while for a boy to have such a character as that? Don't you think you would enjoy hearing people say: That thing is so, you may depend on it, for Dick Sanders told me, and he is to be trusted, you know.'"
Dick shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and his face seemed to be growing red over some feeling, Rosie's papa was not sure what.
At last he said, "It is all very well for a boy like yours to be honest, and all that; why shouldn't he be? Look what chances he has had; and then look what chances I've had! Kicked and cuffed about the world all my life; nobody cares what becomes of me. I heard you pray for Harris this morning, and I thought of it then. There never was a person in this world who cared enough for me to make a prayer about me!"
Little Rosebud
What a strange boy Dick was! For a moment, Rosie's father did not know what to say. Just then Rosie, her head framed in the window, where she had been standing for a few minutes, her hands full of flowers, her face sweetly grave, spoke her troubled thought: "Didn't Jesus pray for you when he lived here? That time when he said 'Now I pray for all who shall believe on me?'"
Dick started so suddenly as to nearly overturn the little table on which he leaned, turned to the window, and looking steadily at Rosie, said hoarsely: "What do you mean?"
"Why, that time, don't you know? When he prayed for his disciples; then he said, 'neither pray I for these alone,' and after that he prayed for everybody who should ever live, who would love him and mind him. If you mean to mind him, he prayed for you, too, mamma told me. Don't you mean to mind him? Because it isn't nice to leave yourself out of his prayer."
Wise little Rosie! Papa said not another word. He thought Dick had gotten his sermon, text and all. Neither did Rosie say any more; she did not know she had preached a sermon.
She went away, humming—