CHILDREN’S PAGE
TED’S TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.
A TRUE STORY.
BY AN ATLANTA TEACHER
Between you and me Ted isn’t his real name, but, since I cannot tell you the name which his father and mother gave him, I suppose Ted will do for a boy as well as anything else. The fact is I do not want that you should think so much of the name as of the boy; for I assure you Ted is a boy worth thinking about, even if he is only nine years old, and if he hasn’t a very great superabundance (Did you ever see or hear such a big word?) of money, and doesn’t own a horse, nor a dog, nor a velocipede, nor a bicycle, nor a hundred other things that money will buy. I can tell you though that Ted has ever so many things that money—no, not all the money that Vanderbilt, nor Jay Gould, nor any other man has—can not buy. I mean Ted’s father and mother and two little brothers, and a cunning little sister with eyes like stars, and cheeks like a peach-blossom, and a mouth like a ripe cherry. Then Ted knows a good deal about ever so many things. Of course he got a great deal of this knowledge from his father and mother, as any boy can who has a good father and mother, and what is a boy going to do who hasn’t both?
Ted knows the men and women in the Bible just like a book; better too. He knows them just as well as he does the people living around him, and he can go to the map and find all those places mentioned in the New Testament.
The father, and mother, and Ted, and the little sister (I wish I might tell you her name), made that map, and some day, perhaps, I shall tell you how they did it. Ted’s baby brother, two years old, can name some of the places, too, though Ted says it is very hard for him to say Cappadocia, and I think it is no wonder, for that is a dreadful word for a child to say.
Well, as I said before, Ted has all these rich possessions of family friends and knowledge, and better than all, he has, I think, the love of God in his heart just as earnest, and true, and tender as if he were a grown-up man. I do not think that one has to wait to be a grown-up person to love God, do you?
Because of this love, Ted has a great love for human beings, and wants to do all he can to help them, and make them better. He knows that he is a small boy, and cannot do a man’s work, but he does not sit down and say he will wait till he is a man, but he does a little boy’s work as well as he can. Now I will tell you what he has done within the last few months. He has formed a temperance society, and ever so many little boys and girls have joined it.