“Nonsense! I want somebody to shove the saw for me in the shed. My fire is dreadful low. I’ll tend the store while you are gone.”
Walter transferred this trial stroke to the saw–horse at once.
He planned the next morning, to rise half an hour earlier than usual, and row awhile on the river. “Am I late?” he said, opening his eyes early, and from his bed looking out of a window toward the sea. The sun was just coming up, and had suffused with a rich crimson the placid waters.
“I’m all right,” Walter said, and hurriedly dressed himself. He was about leaving the room, when he said, “There’s my Bible! I almost forgot that. The fact is you have to be particular about reading, or you will miss a morning pretty readily.”
It is very easy to make gaps in our devotions, and a gap made to–day may mean a gap to–morrow, and when two or three days go by and no Bible has been read, it is very easy to widen the break into an interval of a week. There is nothing so weakening as an intermission now and then. On the other hand, there is nothing that so pays us a handsome profit, as a little care to keep up a good habit. The human will is a curious piece of machinery, and the simple fact that we are in the habit of doing certain things, of going to church, of reading our Bible, saying our prayers, this year, is one of the strongest reasons why we shall be likely to do this next year, and will have vast influence in giving a set and direction to our character. Walter had begun to realize this, and he said to himself, “If I am going to read my Bible, I must be particular to read it every morning.” He sat down in a yellow chair by the window fronting the sea, and opened his Bible. This was one of the verses he read that morning; “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to Thy word. With my whole heart, have I sought Thee: O let me not wander from Thy commandments.”
Somehow, those words were pressed into his memory; printed vividly there like those shining colors off in the sea. When he had finished his reading, he stepped softly downstairs, passed out into the yard, and then made his way to his boat on the shore of the river. The morning though bright and clear, was chilly, and the rowing of the new stroke imparted by Chauncy was “good as the stove in Aunt Lyddy’s kitchen to make one feel warm,” Walter thought. He finished his practice, and was about stepping from the boat upon the smooth little pebbles strewn along the “landin’,” as the fishermen called it, when a sharp voice startled him. “Hul–lo!”
Turning, Walter saw Chauncy Aldrich.
“That you, Aldrich?”
“Nobody else, Plympton. Out trying my new stroke?”
“Yes, it’s first rate to warm a fellow up.”