Now, it so happened that when the family of cousins heard that Stuart was coming to spend the summer, they entered into an agreement to pray for him every night and morning, and to do every thing that they could to get him to be a Christian. A most reasonable and unselfish thing, you will say. What would Stuart have thought of them if they had possessed any other good thing in this world, and had kept all knowledge of it to themselves!
But it was this very thing that had vexed him, and sent him off alone with Tiger, that summer morning, instead of joining the cousins in their fun. And yet they had been very pleasant about it all; they had not tried to force him into doing anything that he did not want to do. I hardly know what made him so absurd.
"Stuart," his Cousin Will said, "I wish you were going to Yale with me this fall."
"I wish I were, with all my heart, old fellow," said Stuart, with the utmost heartiness. "I worked like a Jehu to get ready to enter, but I didn't accomplish it; never mind, just you look out for me next fall. I'll be there as sure as my name is Milburn."
"Stuart," his Cousin Robert said, a little later, as they were coming up the walk together, "I wish you were going this road to heaven with me," and Stuart answered nothing and looked annoyed and wished his cousin would let him alone. Now, if you see any sense to that you see more than I do.
As to the "old maids" there was only one of them in his uncle's family, and as she was his own mother's own sister, and he had often been heard to say that she was the very best old aunty that a fellow ever had, one would think he might have excused her for wanting him to go to heaven where his mother had been waiting for him for three years.
However he didn't. It was her softly spoken sentence as they rose from prayers that morning: "I prayed for you all the time, Stuart," that had sent him off in a pet with his fishing rod over his shoulder.
"You may go along," he said to Tiger; "thank fortune you can't talk; if you could no doubt you would ask me to go to prayer-meeting to-night. What a preaching set they are! I wish I had known it, and I would have steered clear of them and gone home with Randolph. Well, I'll have one good day; there isn't a house within four miles of the point where I am going, and fishes can't preach. I will live in rest for one morning. We will have some good rational enjoyment all by ourselves, won't we, Tiger? And carry home a string of trout for Aunt Mattie, to pay her for looking so sober at us this morning."
Saying which he snapped his fingers cheerily at the dog, and sent him in search of a ground squirrel, and made believe that he was perfectly happy. What do you suppose came into Stuart's mind and heart before he had held his rod in the water ten minutes, and followed him up with a persistent voice all the morning? Nothing so very new nor strange, nothing but what he had known ever since he was a little boy five years old, and had stood at his mother's knee, one summer Sunday morning, and said it to her; it was just this little verse: "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."