“Your ’ealth, Blathers.”
“Same to you, Rampy.”
“And now, Liz,” said the latter, as she pushed in her cup for more, “let’s ’ear all about it.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Blathers also pushing in her cup, “let’s ’ave your wersion, Liz.”
While Liz gives her version of Laidlaw’s misfortunes we will return to the garden, where, being Sunday afternoon, Susy Blake was busy with a small class of the most disreputable little ragged boys that the neighbourhood produced.
The boys were emphatically bad boys. They feared neither God nor man. The property of other people was their chief source of livelihood, and the streets, or the jails, were their homes. Nevertheless, when in the garden class, those boys were patterns of good behaviour, because each boy knew that if he did not behave and keep quiet he would infallibly be dismissed from the class, and this was a punishment which none of them could endure. Unlike many other teachers, Susy had not to go about enticing boys to her Sabbath class. Her chief difficulty was to prevent them coming in such numbers as would have overflowed the garden altogether.
And the secret of this was that Susy Blake possessed much of an unconscious influence called loving-kindness. No weapon of the spiritual armoury is equal to this. In the hands of a man it is tremendous. In those of a pretty girl it is irresistible. By means of it she brought the fiercest little arabs of the slums to listen to the story of Jesus and His love. She afterwards asked God, the Holy Spirit, to water the good seed sown, and the result was success.
But loving-kindness was not her only weapon. She had in addition quite a glittering little armoury in which were such weapons as play of fancy, lively imagination, fervent enthusiasm, resolute purpose, fund of anecdote, sparkling humour, intense earnestness, and the like, all of which she kept flashing around the heads of her devoted worshippers until they were almost beside themselves with astonishment, repentance, and good resolves. Of course, when away from her influence the astonishment was apt to diminish, the repentance to cease, and the good resolves to vanish away; but resolute purpose had kept Susy at them until in the course of time there was a perceptible improvement in the environment of Cherub Court, and a percentage of souls rescued from the ranks of the ragamuffins.
On this particular Sunday Tommy Splint, who was a regular attendant at the garden class, arrived late.
“Why, Tommy,” said the teacher, turning herself from a little boy on whom she had been trying specially to impress some grand eternal truth, “this is not like you. Has anything happened to detain you?”