"I surely will," she answered, "if I am alive."
Saturday night somebody stole Nyâ's canoe, and on Sunday nobody would lend her another, yet she was in her place in church, and in time. Her home was on the opposite shore of the river, at that place a third of a mile wide, with a current flowing deep and strong. How had she crossed?
In the simplest way in the world—by swimming. Some of the boys had seen the dark head bobbing up and down in the waves, or it is doubtful whether she would have said a word about her performance.
But, little women, who sometimes pout at wearing an old bonnet or dress to church, please think of the African girl, so anxious to keep her promise that she swam the Ogawe on Sunday morning rather than be absent when the good missionaries expected to see her at the Christian worship.
[THE BRAVEST FEAT OF ALL.]
BY DAVID KER.
"Warm work, eh, Pierre," said one French grenadier to another, as his cap was knocked off by a bullet, while a second tore a strip of skin from his shoulder.
"True enough, comrade," answered the other, wiping the blood from a wound in his cheek; "but the Little Corporal will get us through it all right."
The Little Corporal (otherwise called the Emperor Napoleon) was indeed doing his best to get them through it; but honest Jacques might well say that it was warm work. The great fight which was to be known in history as the battle of Jena was at its hottest, and no one—among the common soldiers at least—could yet say which side was likely to get the best of it. True, the French were ninety thousand strong against forty thousand Prussians, and had taken their enemies completely by surprise; but, on the other hand, the Prussians were up on a high hill, where it was not easy to get at them, and the centre of their line was covered by a village, which they had fortified and filled with cannon, making it altogether "a hard nut to crack."