“I think, my friend,” said the stranger, “that you are one of us now.”
“You may well say now,” replied the other, “for when you was here afore, you’d a gone out of the door a deal quicker nor you came in; but, I bless the Lord, things are changed now.”
“Yes, indeed,” said the other, “it is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes; though, indeed, he does work such wonderful things that we’ve daily cause to bless and praise him. Well, my friend—for we are friends, I see, in the best of bonds now—I have not long to stay now, but I just want to ask you one thing. I should like to have a total abstinence meeting next month in Langhurst. Will you say a word for us? We want some working man who has been rescued, through God’s mercy, from the chains of the drink, to stand up and tell, in a simple, straightforward way, what he once was, and what God has done for him as a pledged abstainer; and I judge, from what I hear, that you’re just the man we want.”
Johnson paused for a while.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head; “I don’t know. I’m not so sure it’ll do at all.”
“Oh, fayther,” cried Betty, “you must do what the gentleman axes you. It may do good to some poor creatures, and lead ’em to sign. It’s only a small candle-end as the Lord’s given such as we are, but we must light it, and let it shine.”
“Well,” said her father, slowly, “maybe I oughtn’t to say ‘No;’ and yet you may be sure, if it gets talked on in the village, it’s little peace as I shall have.”
“Well, my friend,” said the stranger, “of course I don’t wish to bring you into trouble. Still this is one of the ways in which you may take up a cross nobly for your Saviour, and he’ll give the strength to carry it.”
“Say no more,” replied Johnson; “if the Lord spares me, they shall hear a gradely tale from me.”
It was soon noised abroad in Langhurst that Thomas Johnson was to give an account of himself as a reformed man and a total abstainer, at a meeting to be held in the village in the following month of November.