Chapter XXII: Sowings

"And thy soul may see the value
Of its patient morns and eves,
When the everlasting garner
Shall be filled with precious sheaves."

IT was a bright summer day, just after dinner. Julia Bradford stood in the front doorway, waiting for her particular friend Alice Trafton. Her broad-brimmed sun-hat lay upon the stop, and she was putting lines in her young face in the desperate effort to make sense out of what seemed to her a senseless paragraph in her despised Cæsar.

"Dear me!" she thought, closing the book. "I can't do anything with it. I suppose Herbert would help me, but I won't ask him now while Mr. Amesbury is here. I don't like him much. I wonder why it is that Bertie is so fond of him? I suppose it is because they are such old friends, but they are so very unlike. Lewie is nice, that's certain, and that is just the trouble; he thinks that being nice and proper, kind and generous, and all that, is going to open heaven's door. What puzzles me is, what did Christ come for, if we can live so as to merit God's favour?

"Oh, I am glad I haven't got to depend upon my good deeds as a ladder to climb into heaven upon. It would be too short to reach the threshold, and what would I lean it against? But that is just what Mr. Amesbury is depending upon. I heard him say so yesterday. Why don't somebody try to reason him out of such a dreadful mistake? I suppose that would not be easy. Why don't Alice come? What a silky, shiny hat that is, and that duster hasn't a wrinkle in it. The fellow always looks as though he were done up fresh every morning. But, nice as he is, I can't quite like him. There's something lacking."

Here she returned to her Latin puzzle for a few moments, then leaned out to look for Alice, and suddenly, as if a new idea presented itself, she threw down the book and sprang up the staircase. Returning a moment later, she took the shiny hat from the rack and slipped a folded paper under the lining, with an inaudible, "If it please Thee, O God, in thine own time, let this see the light and do its work."

Replacing the hat, she picked up her own, and went down the walk to join her tardy friend.

Herbert and Lewie were at home for their summer vacation, and as Lewie did not find his home more congenial, but rather less so, as the years went by, he had fallen into the habit of spending much of his time at the Bradfords's, and this is how it happened that the speckless hat and unwrinkled duster were hanging upon the hall rack upon that particular summer day.

"Am I late?" asked Alice, as she came hurrying down the street. "You see father had a letter that we were all interested in, and I stayed to talk it over. Uncle Philip has written to invite Henry to make his home with his family in New York this next winter, and I am to go to take care of him. He is to paint in the studio of some great artist, and I am to take organ lessons. Isn't it splendid?

"Uncle Philip," she continued, "took the pictures father sent him to the artist, and he said they showed a remarkable talent. You know Henry only took one quarter's lessons of Ledlie. Oh, I am so glad! Of course I am glad that I am going, but it is for Henry that I care the most; he has waited so long and patiently for the opportunity, and now that it has come, he is just as quiet as ever, but I can't keep still. Say, Julia, don't you think it is lovely?"

"I should have said so several minutes ago, if you had given me a chance," returned Julia, laughing. "I am very glad indeed. When do you go?"

"The first of October, and this is the third week in August. Only six weeks to get ready!"

"It is fortunate that it is no longer. Westville couldn't hold you a great while."

"Oh, I shall quiet down presently, and settle to planning and contriving, turning things wrong side out and upside down, sponging, piecing and stretching, in the effort to get up a presentable wardrobe with the least possible expense."

"You talk as if your father was a poor man," said Julia, with another laugh.

"Well, I suppose he could give me all I want, but I like to be economical. Mother says she got in the way of it in the first years after father gave up letting horses upon Sunday. You know business fell off, and Henry's sickness cost so much that I suppose they felt very poor, but father says he has never been sorry that he took that stand. I have heard him say that it was his first step toward becoming a Christian."

"I think it was real noble in your father to take such a stand," said Julia, with enthusiasm. "Such things always make me feel jubilant; and this reminds me, Bertie had a letter from Nick Turner this morning. You remember, he went West a year ago. He says—"

But while Julia tells the story in her way, we will read for ourselves what he says:—

"MY DEAR FRIEND:—Seeing you were so kind as to write to me, and as you requested an answers, I will try to do as you wish, though I am not much of a writer. I write home to the old folks pretty often and manage to make them understand what I mean, but it is just as it is in talking. With some folks the words slip out easy like, and sound all smooth and regular, while other, blunder along, getting in the wrong words, or the right ones in the wrong places, and I happen to be one of the blunderers with the pen. I can do some things a sight better than I can write letters.

"How did I happen to come out here? Well, you see there are a good many reasons. The Westville folks never could forget that I had been Nick Turner the loafer, and it wasn't pleasant for a fellow to hear it whispered, 'He was one of the worst characters in the town. I'm afraid he won't hold out.' 'I hope he is really sincere, but he has been so dissipated that his old habits may prove too strong.' Now, that's what I did hear whispered, and I thought I would come off out here where I could have a fair chance. If I'd a been needed at home, I'd a stuck it through, but if Em's husband took hold of things there, I was only in the way, so I just swung off, and I'm awful glad I did. This is a grand country to draw breath in, and I've got just the snuggest slice off the prairie that ever a man looked at. This is going to be a grand farming country.

"You ask if I have the means of grace here. Well, I have my Bible, and a Saviour to pray to, if that's what you mean; but if you mean ministers and churches and Christian people, we haven't them here. There is work for a missionary. I hope you'll get through your Greek and Hebrew, and all that, as soon as possible, and come out here and talk to these fellows just as you did to me that night I took the apples home for you. There wasn't a bit of Greek in that talk, but for all that, it hit just right, and I thank God to-day for sending you to me.

"Another question you ask, What am I doing for Jesus? I can tell you what I am trying to do. I board with a man who owns the next bit of prairie to mine, and it isn't much like home, I can tell you. I missed mother's bread and butter the first meal I ate here, but I missed father's blessing the most, and the next time when we got to the table, I said, 'See here, mister, if you'd just as lief, I'd like to say a bit of prayer over the victuals. I've been used to it at home, and it don't seem right not to do it.'

"'Pray away,' was what he said, and I opened my mouth, and I think God put the words into my heart, for they were never my own rough words. Since then I always say them at every meal, and I think the folks are getting to like it, for if I am behind time, they always wait. Then I try to speak a word for Christ when it comes right, and the boys—here are ten or twelve in the neighbourhood—all hang on to me just as they did in Westville, when I was such a bad sinner that I led them the wrong way. Well, every Sunday we get together. There is a little cabin on my land, and we generally go there, and I try to tell them about the Saviour, and about God's laws, and all the good things that I know.

"All this isn't much to do, but you see I ain't a scholar. I can't explain things very well, but I can read to them what the Bible says, and tell them what Christ has done for me, and then I can pray; one needn't be a Greek scholar to pray. Thank God, anybody that has wants can pray, and God can understand if one don't get the words all in straight. Last Sunday the man I board with, and another member, came in. I felt a little kinder queer, for Mr. Blake has been to the Assembly, but I said to Nick Turner, 'Now, don't be ashamed of Christ, and upset all the work you've been trying to do by running away,' and he answered back, 'I ain't ashamed of Christ; it is my blundering way of reading and talking that I'm ashamed of;' but I said again, 'You are mistaken; you talk to these same men by the hour about farming, and never think of your blunders; you know you are speaking truth,—do it as well as you can, and leave the rest with God.'

"When we broke up, Mr. Blake said to me, 'I want to thank you; you have made me ashamed of myself. I used to be a church member at the East, but I guess I left my religion there, or lost it here; anyway, I never thought of doing as you are doing.'

"I have written all this to let you see how much you are needed here, but I suppose you can't come for several years, if you thought it was the place for you; but can't you send us somebody? There is a grand chance for somebody to work for Christ."

Ah! And wasn't that somebody doing his work well? Who shall say that Nick Turner was not chosen of God to preach his gospel to these people? At least he was preparing the way for the coming missionary.

"How happy Herbert must be to think that he was the means of Nick's conversion to Christ. Oh! If I could save one soul, I'd be willing to sacrifice a great deal—at least I think I would." It was truthful Alice who said this.

"I think of this very often," returned Julia. "I do not know that I have ever done anything like that, I mean anything that has really helped any one. I have tried to lead my schoolmates to Jesus, but my efforts do not seem to be blessed."

"I don't suppose that you always know for certain; maybe when we get to heaven, we shall find out that God has accepted our work, and maybe some souls will thank us then for the right word."

"Perhaps so," said Helen a little sadly. She was thinking of her little effort just put forth. Would it bear fruit?

Just here I may as well record a bit of a talk that occurred a few days before Henry and Alice went to New York. Mrs. Trafton had a slight illness, and Dr. Myers was called in. Aunt Harriet, who had remained with her brother ever since she came to nurse Henry when he was first injured, was full of rejoicings over her nephew's prospects, and detailed the plans for Dr. Myers's benefit, prophesying that he would become famous. The doctor listened with a queer smile.

"I am very glad indeed," he said. "And now, Miss Trafton, do you see how this has come about? You remember, perhaps, that once you could not discover the loving Hand that destroys to build up; you could not understand how what seemed a great calamity might prove a blessing."

"No, I couldn't, and I am not sure of it yet. Don't you suppose that Henry would have made just as good an artist if he had two sound legs and a strong back?"

"No, I don't," replied the doctor. "He might have painted pictures as a recreation, but his work in all probability would have been found in connection with that livery stable, and you know that the business at that time was not conducted upon Christian principles, and perhaps but for this, which we call a calamity, that might never have been changed. Henry might have sustained his Christian character through it all, but it would have been a hard and dangerous path. But suppose, what is not at all likely, that he had been allowed to follow his inclinations and had become an artist, he could never have done the work he will now. The growth of heart and mind which has come through suffering, and could come in no other way, will tell upon his work; his pictures will have a character purer and nobler than he could have given them had not his own soul been purified by these years of discipline."