We ask for so many foolish things. If we should get them we would not know what to do with the answers. “Sophie,” the scrub-woman, of Brooklyn, in her quaint, half-broken English, once said this:
“I heard about a countryman who was in the city for the first time. He went into a restaurant and made up his mind to have something fine, whatever the cost. He saw a man at the next table put a little mustard on his plate, and he said ‘that must be fine and expensive, he has so little, but no matter what it costs, I will haf some.’ So he told the waiter to bring him a dollar’s worth of that stuff. A plate was brought. He took a big spoonful: it bit him; he spit it out and did not want any more. So, we ask for things that if our Father should give them to us we would only be bitten by them and be glad to get rid of them.” (Text.)
(144)
Asking and Receiving—See [Faith and Prayer].
ASKING, BOLDNESS IN
The story is told in the Springfield Republican that Andrew Carnegie asked a young man who was about to become a student at Jena to get for him an autograph of Professor Haeckel. When it arrived it read thus: “Ernst Haeckel gratefully acknowledges the receipt from Andrew Carnegie of a Zumpt microscope for the biological laboratory of the Jena University.” Mr. Carnegie made good, admiring the scientist more than ever. (Text.)
(145)
ASLEEP
Tsavo is 133 miles from Mombasa, and during the construction of the line no less than twenty-nine Indians were eaten there by lions. The work was threatened, and a party of three young men—Hubner, Parenti and Ryal—took a car and lay in wait at night for a bold man-eater, who had stalked up and picked up a man on an open railway truck as the train slowed down into the station. Parenti lay on the floor, Hubner was in an upper berth, and Ryal was on the seat of the carriage, with his rifle. Ryal was on guard, but unfortunately he fell asleep. At 2 o’clock in the morning the man-eater they were hunting entered the carriage, picked up Ryal, jumped through the window, and fled to the forest, where the unfortunate man’s whitened bones were long afterward found.—Peter MacQueen, Leslie’s Weekly.
(146)