Christian life -- Fiction; Farm life -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
This good clergyman had a family to support on his miserable salary of
three hundred dollars a year, voted him by a Common Council that spent
ten thousand carousing in their tea-room. Had any one of those city
fathers ever been up so early, they might often have seen this good
man at daybreak toiling on foot to the city, or perchance miles away
to some country town, in search of a service place for some repentant
prisoner, or to carry a message from a sick child to its friends. In
his gentle humility the good man never complained, never said that the
pay awarded to his labors by the Common Council of our most wealthy
city, was too little for his wants. You saw it in his garments. You
might have read it in his meek sigh, when some object of compassion
presented unusual claims to his charity; but in his speech and
deportment he seemed ever grateful for the little that was given him.
This true-hearted Christian remains upon his post to this day. If a
single hundred dollars has been added to his yearly means of support,
it was through the intercession of others, and from no discontent
expressed by himself. Surely the reward of such men must be hereafter,
or in the heaven of their own souls.
It was pleasant to see the eyes of those little children brighten,
when the good clergyman entered the hospital. They were fatherless,
and he was better than a father to them. They were sick, and he
comforted them, even as our Lord comforted little children when they
were brought to Him. His hand touched their pale foreheads caressingly;
his mild voice sunk into their little hearts like dew upon a bruised
flower. His very tread upon the stairs was a blessing to them; when
they heard it, all unconsciously the little creatures would smile upon
their pillows, and murmur over fragments of the Lord's Prayer, for
with its holy language, his own lips had rendered most of them
familiar.
To this brave Christian little Isabel and her friend had become
greatly attached. He sat with them in the grape arbors; he helped them
arrange bouquets for the sick children, and while they were busy at
their sweet task, he, in his gentle way, would lead their thoughts
from the flowers to the God who gives them to beautify the earth. At
such times he would go quietly away, leaving the children happier and
better, but without the slightest consciousness that they had been
receiving religious instruction.
This was the man to whom Mary Fuller appealed one night, as he paused
to speak with her in the garden-path that leads along the water.
"Oh! sir, I have been waiting for you here; I thought you would come
this way," cried the child, placing her little hand in his, "I have
something to tell you--something that makes me happy as a bird?"
"You look happy, my child, and you look good, too," said the
clergyman, shaking her hand with a smile. "Come, now, tell me what
it is."
"It is a long story, and one that would make you cry if you knew all.
You are not in a hurry sir?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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