"It's easy for God to teach you and easy to ask him to do it. If it was anything else you wanted to do, you would not stop trying till you found out," said Mr. Linden—"and that is just the way here. Now I am going to give you a copy of all this," he said, throwing his own little Bible softly into Faith's lap and stepping forward to the prow of the boat (which she thought held only lunch baskets)—"and I shall turn down a leaf at the story of the net full of good fishes—and another at a place that tells of a net full 'of every kind, both bad and good.' And I want you to read them, and think about them, and find out how to follow Christ—and then come on!" He took his seat once more in the stern of the boat, and held out the Bible to the fisherman. The other man, slowly dipping his oars in and out, met his look too, but made no answer.
The man at the net took the book and turned over the leaves with a wondering, considering air.
"What do you reckon this here's worth?" he said somewhat awkwardly, without raising his eyes from it.
"Worth daily reading and study—worth all you have in the world, if you will use it right," said Mr. Linden. "You need not think about any other value—I had it in trust to give away."
"I'm much obleeged to you,—I'll take a look at it now and then. Do you live along here, anywheres?"
"In Pattaquasset, just now," Mr. Linden said, as he prepared to make sail again. "I don't very often come to this part of the river."
"Well hold on!" said the man, beginning to pull in his net with great vivacity,—"I'm bound to give you a fish—if I've got one here. Bear a hand, Dick! Haint you got a place on board there that you can stow it, without skeerin' the lady?"—
"I'll try to find one!" said Mr. Linden, answering the proposal just as it was meant. "If the lady is scared she shall turn her face the other way."
"She'll turn it which way you say?—" ventured the fisher insinuatingly.
Faith did not seem afraid of the fish, by the way she leaned over the stern of the boat and eyed the up-coming nets which the men were drawing in. She had listened to the foregoing talk, to the full as intently as those for whom it was meant, and with a multitude of interests at work in her mind and heart of which they had never dreamed. And now her eye was bent on the net; but her thoughts were on that other kind of fishing of which she had just seen an example—the first she had ever seen of Mr. Linden's!—and her full heart was longingly thinking, among other thoughts, of the few there were to draw those nets, and the multitude to be drawn! What Faith saw in the meshes the man's hands were slowly pulling up!—