JACK THOUGHT AND THOUGHT.
Jack was not disposed to answer. He was thinking. “Why doesn’t He cure your back now?” he asked, speaking part of his thought.
His uncle’s voice was a trifle lower, and hinted at strong feeling which was being controlled. “I believe he will, Jackie, just as soon as it is best for me to be cured. I think I am going to get quite well; indeed, I may say I am almost sure of it, though the surgeon is not. I believe the Lord Jesus has decided to let me be well and strong again, so I can be a witness for him, as the lame man was, you remember. Why, we didn’t finish the story, did we? And there is no time now. Here come the people from church. You look that up, Jackie, in your Bible sometime, and see what an unanswerable argument the man was.”
Jack the younger thought over the entire story later, while he was eating his beef tea. Thought and thought, and by a way which was clear to himself, came at last to this point: “I wonder if He let me have the mumps so as to stop me from doing different from what mother says? If I hadn’t thought it wouldn’t do any harm to run into Judge Howell’s a few minutes, even after she had told me not to stop anywhere, why, I suppose I shouldn’t have had these horrid old mumps. Maybe He knows it was the only way to cure me. Well, I tell you what it is; I believe I’ll be cured. I guess, after this, I’ll do just exactly as I’m told, and be a ‘witness’ myself, so that folks will begin to say of me: ‘Jack Campbell won’t do it; his folks told him not to, and you can’t move Jack after that any more than you could a stone wall.’ I declare, that will be tip-top fun. I’ll do it!”
Pansy.
MY PRETTY DEER.
