“Dearly, dearly, He has loved,
And we must love Him too,”
he longed to know more of His life and sayings. Must he wait to learn of the Saviour’s words—wait until he should meet Him in heaven?
The questioning found a happy answer when he was about fourteen. A summer school was started in the neighborhood, and on rainy days and at odd times he learned the alphabet, to make figures, to form letters and to read. New thoughts came into his mind, new hopes, new plans. He heard of a large school up the river where Northern teachers taught eight months of the year.
One day the good mother was startled with the question, “May I go to school at Memphis?” She could only answer, “I am too poor to send you. I can give you nothing but my prayers.” But Frank believed those prayers were worth more than bales and bales of cotton, and with a few dollars in his pocket he started for the city. He was sure that “King Jesus” would have compassion upon him as He did upon that other young man who “was the only son of his mother and she was a widow.”
Reaching the strange city, he soon found a Christian gentleman who wished a boy to wait on the table. “Work for his board and go to school,” was the good news sent home. One year went by, two, three and four. Slow but faithful, he was going up in his classes, winning the respect of school-mates and teachers.
One October, as he re-entered school, he modestly told his teachers that he had taught during the summer. It was said so quietly that little heed was paid to it, until another young man came from the same town and announced that the unostentatious Frank had done a remarkable work in the way of Sabbath-school, temperance and day school. No one had thought him able to do anything of the kind.
And these long days, while you are swinging in hammocks and going to lakes and rivers in the search for cool air, our young friend is teaching a hundred dusky boys and girls each week day, and directing the Bible lessons of a much larger number on Sunday. He writes to ask for S. S. papers, for a temperance text book and for the prayers of his teacher.
Although he did grow up in a cotton patch, he is a useful man, and expects to one day see the King in his beauty, in the land that is very far off.