Christian life -- Juvenile fiction; Clergy -- Juvenile fiction; Social classes -- Juvenile fiction; Temperance -- Juvenile fiction
"Ho!" said Jim. "You know a heap, Tode, don't you?"
Tode turned on him a grave anxious face.
"Do you know about them? Well, just you come and find them for me,
that's a good fellow. I'm in a powerful hurry."
Thus appealed to, Jim, nothing loth to display his wisdom, sauntered
toward the table, and speedily found and patronizingly pointed out the
commandments. Tode read eagerly until he came to those words, "Remember
the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." Then he read slowly and carefully,
"Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is
the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy
maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates."
Three times did Tode's astonished eyes go over this commandment in all
its length and breadth; then he looked up and spoke with deliberate
emphasis,
"This beats all creation! And the strangest part of it is that you
didn't tell me anything about it, grandma."
"Whatever is the boy talking about?" said grandma, wheeling her rocker
around to get a full view of his excited face; and then Tode gave a
synopsis of the evening sermon, and the history of his amazement,
culminating with this first reading of the fourth commandment.
"And so you've been at your business all day!" exclaimed the astonished
old lady. "Why, for the land's sake, I thought you had gone off to some
meeting away at the other end of the city."
"I never once knew the first thing about this in the Bible. How was I
going to know it was a mean thing to do?" questioned Tode, with
increasing excitement. "And it was the best day I've had, too, and that
makes it all the meaner."
And his voice choked a little, and his head went suddenly down on his
arm.
"Well, now, I wouldn't mind, deary," spoke the old lady in soothing
tones, after a few moments of silence. "If you didn't know anything
about it, of course you wasn't to blame. 'Tisn't as if you had learned
it in Sunday-school, and all that, and I wouldn't mind about the
business. Like enough you'll have more days just as brisk as Sunday."
"It isn't that," Tode answered, disconsolately, lifting his head. "It's
all them Sundays that I've been and wasted, when I might have gone to
meeting. Been righter to go than to stay away, it seems; and it's
thinking about lots of other things that's wrong maybe, just like this,
and a fellow not knowing it."
And as he spoke he listlessly turned over the leaves of the old Bible,
until his eye was arrested by the words, "Thou shalt guide me with thy
counsel."
"That's exactly it," he told himself. "I've got to have a Bible. I'll
get one little enough to go into my jacket pocket, and then, says I,
we'll see if I can't find out about things. And after this I'm to shut
up box and go to church, am I? Well, that's one good thing, anyhow."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account