“Seems if I got nearer to Him, and He was sorrier for me when I’m cold and hungry and father licks me so hard for nothin’,” he said, and his prayers were mostly said to the baby boy he had first heard about, and we have no doubt that God listened with love and sympathy for the poor child who sometimes asked so touchingly, “Was you ever hungry, dear Jesus, and be flogged and cuffed as I am when I hain’t done nothin’, and did the snow come into your winder and cover the front of your bed, and make you so cold at night?” At first Bennie’s prayers were mostly interrogatories of the Lord with regard to His early life; but as he learned more from the faithful Nellie, he came at last to ask for what he wanted in his own peculiar way, and God, who always hears and answers the prayer of faith like Bennie’s, heard and answered him, as we shall see in our next chapter. CHAPTER III. BENNIE’S SECOND CHRISTMAS. The year had rolled round swiftly, and the little ones of St. Luke’s were again looking eagerly forward to Christmas Eve and the wonderful tree, which all the summer long had been growing down by the lake and gathering new beauty and strength for the task it was to perform. It was in the cellar of St. Luke’s now, and the ladies and children were busy trimming the little stone church on the corner, and Maggie Hewitt was with them, holding twine and pulling twigs for Miss Nellie, at whose side she hovered constantly, and whom some of the young girls called “Miss Morgan’s shadow.” But Bennie was not there, and if you had gone down on the tow path that winter day and entered the room, into which the snow used to drift at night, and where Bennie used to hide away from his drunken, crazy father, you would scarcely have known the place. Nellie Morgan had proved the good angel of that house, as of many others, and discovering that appreciation of tidiness and comfort which Bennie possessed to so great a degree, she had made his surroundings as pleasant as possible under the circumstances. Bennie was a delicate child, and often sick for days and even weeks, and when Miss Nellie found how distasteful to him was that dingy, dreary room where the broken window was stuffed with rags, and the damp, stained paper hung in strips on the wall, she went to work with a will, and many an article of cast off furniture found its way from the garret of the Morgan house to the hut on the tow path, and in comparison with his condition one year ago, Bennie now lodged like a prince, and felt almost as happy as one. There was fresh paper on the walls, the window was mended, and a clean white curtain hung before it; a strip of carpet covered the floor, and Bennie’s bed was a wide, capacious crib, which had once been Wallie Morgan’s; and there, propped up with pillows and clad in a bright dressing-gown, Bennie lay that December day when his sister Maggie was busy at the church where he so longed to be.