"It storms like the mischief," Mr. Roberts said on this same evening, as he closed the door with a bang, and a shrug of his shoulders. "Very few people will venture out this evening. Tode, if you want an hour or two for a frolic, now is your time to take it. After you have been up with the mail you can go where you like until the train is due." Here was fun for Tode. This would give him two full hours, and he had at least two dozen schemes for filling up the time; but it chanced that wind and sleet and cold were too much even for him. "Jolly!" he said. "What a regular old stunner _that_ was," as a gust of wind nearly blew him away; and he clapped both hands to his head to see if his cap had withstood the shock. "This ain't just the charmingest kind of an evening that ever I was out. I'd tramp back to our hotel quicker, only a fellow don't like to spend his evening just exactly where he does all the others when it's a holiday. I wonder what's in here? They're singing like fun, whatever 'tis. I mean to peek in--might _go_ in; no harm done in taking a look. 'Tain't anyways likely that it blows in there as it does out here. Tode and me will just take a look, we will." And he pushed open the door and slipped into the nearest seat by the fire just as the singing was concluded, and the Rev. John Birge began to read; and the words he read were about that strange old story of the great company and the lack of food, and the lad with the five barley loaves and two small fishes, and the multitude that were fed, and the twelve baskets of fragments that remained--story familiar in all its details to every Sabbath-school scholar in the land, but utterly new to Tode, falling on his ear for the first time, bearing all the charm of a fairy tale to him. There was just one thing that struck this ignorant boy as very strange, that a company of men and women, some of them gray-headed, should spend their time in coming together that stormy evening, and reading over and talking about so utterly improbable a tale. He listened eagerly to see what might be the clew to this mystery. "We are wont to say," began Mr. Birge, "that the age of miracles is past; yet if we knew in just what mysterious, unknown paths God leads the children of this day to himself, I think some of their experiences would seem to us no less miraculous than is this story which we are considering to-night."