Stories Worth Rereading Part 36

Mr. Dale looked at him, and he liked the bearing of the lad. "Go ahead," he said. "You may have your groceries at the same rate I make clerks."

"Thank you," responded Elnathan, while the grat.i.tude he felt crept into his tones. "For myself," he thought, "I would not have asked for a reduction, but for Uncle Chris I will. I have a big job on hand."

That day he told Mr. Lightenhome that he had secured a place at Mr. Dale's, and that he was to have a reduction on groceries. "Which means, Uncle Chris, that I pay for the groceries for us both, while you do the cooking and pay the rent."

Silently and swiftly Mr. Lightenhome calculated. He saw that if he were saved the buying of the groceries for himself, he could eke out his small h.o.a.rd till after Christmas. The poorhouse receded a little from the foreground of his vision as he gazed into the eyes of the boy opposite him at the table. He did not know that his own eyes spoke eloquently of his deliverance, but Elnathan choked as he went on eating.

"Now hustle, El!" he commanded one day on his way back to the store.

"There's gold in your eyes if you keep them open, and in your tongue if you keep it civil, and in your back and in your wits if they are nimble. All I have to say is, Get it out."

"Get it out," he repeated when he had reached the rear of the store. And he began busily to fill and label kerosene cans, gasoline cans, and mola.s.ses jugs. From there he went to the cellar to measure up potatoes.

"Never saw such a fellow!" grumbled his companion utility boy. "You'd think he run the store by the way he steps round with his head up and them sharp eyes of his into everything. 'Hi there!' he said to me. 'Fill that measure of gasoline full before you pour it into the can. Mr. Dale doesn't want the name of giving short measure because you are careless.' Let's do some reporting on him, and get him out of the store," he said. "But there's nothing to report, and there never will be."

But the boy persisted, and very shortly he found himself out of a position.

"You needn't get another boy if you don't want to, Mr. Dale," observed Elnathan, cheerily. "I am so used to the place now that I can do all he did, as well as my own work. And, anyway, I would rather do the extra work than go on watching somebody to keep him from measuring up short or wrong grade on everything he touches." And Elnathan smiled. He had lately discovered that he had ceased to hate work.

Mr. Dale smiled in return. "Very well," he said. "Go ahead and do it all if you want to."

A week he went ahead, and at the end of that time he found, to his delight, that Mr. Dale had increased his wages. "Did you think I would take the work of two boys and pay for the work of one?" asked Mr. Dale.

"I didn't think at all, sir," replied Elnathan, joyously; "but I am the gladdest boy in Kingston to get a raise."

"Uncle Chris," he said that night, "I got a raise today."

Mr. Lightenhome expressed his pleasure, and his sense that the honor was well merited, but Elnathan did not hear a word he said, because he had something more to say himself.

"Uncle Chris," he went on, his face very red, "I have been saving up for some time, and tomorrow's your birthday. Here is a present for you." And he thrust out a ten-dollar piece, with the words, "I never made a present before."

Slowly the old man took the money, and again his eyes outdid his tongue in speaking his grat.i.tude. And there was a great glow in the heart of the boy.

"That's some of the gold I dug out of myself, Uncle Chris," he laughed.

"You are the one who first told me it was in me. I do not know whether it came out of my arms or my legs or my head."

"I know where the very best gold there is in you is located, Elnathan,"

smiled the old man. "It is your heart that is gold, my boy."

Two months later Elnathan was a clerk at twenty-five dollars a month. "Now we're fixed, Uncle Chris!" he cried, when he told the news. "You and I can live forever on twenty-five dollars a month."

"Do you mean it?" asked the old man, tremblingly. "Do you wish to be c.u.mbered with me?"

"No, I do not, Uncle Chris," answered the boy, with a beaming look. "I do not want to be c.u.mbered with you. I just want to go on living here with you."

Then to the old man the poorhouse forever receded from sight. He remembered Adelizy no more, as he looked with pride and tenderness on the boy who stood erect and alert before him, looked again and yet again, for he saw in him the Lord's deliverer, though he knew not that he had been raised up by his own kind hand.--_Gulielma Zollinger, in the Wellspring_.

ONLY A JACK-KNIFE

When the lamented James A. Garfield was struggling to obtain an education, he supported himself for several years by teaching. His first school was in Muskingum County, Ohio, and the little frame house where he began his work as a teacher, is still standing, while some of the boys and girls who received instruction from him that term are yet alive to testify to his faithfulness as a common-school teacher. He was quite a young man at that time, in fact, he was still in his teens, and it must have been rather embarra.s.sing for him to attempt to teach young men and women, some of them older than himself; but he was honest in his efforts to try to do his best, and, as is always the case under such circ.u.mstances, he succeeded admirably.

One day, after repeatedly cautioning a little chap not to hack his desk with the new Barlow in his possession, the young teacher transferred the offending knife to his own pocket, quietly informing the culprit that it should be returned at the close of the afternoon session.

During the afternoon two of the committeemen called to examine the school, and young Garfield was so interested in the special recitations conducted that he let the boy go home in the evening without even mentioning the knife. The subject did not recur to him again until after supper, and perhaps would not have been recalled to him then had not he chanced to put his hand into his pocket for a pencil.

"Look there!" he exclaimed, holding up the knife. "I took it from Sandy Williams, with the promise that it should be returned in the evening, and I have let him go home without it. I must carry it to him at once."

"Never mind, man! Let it stand till morning," urged Mrs. Ross, the motherly woman with whom he boarded.

"I cannot do that," replied Garfield; "the little fellow will think I am a thief."

"No danger of that, James," insisted the well-meaning woman. "He will know that you forgot it, and all will be well in the morning."

"But, you see, I promised, Mrs. Ross, and a promise is always binding. I must go tonight, and carry it to him," urged the young man, drawing on his coat.

"It is all of two miles to his father's, and just look how dark it is, and raining, too," said the woman, opening the door to convince her boarder that things were as bad as she had represented them.

"I am young and strong, and can make my way quite easily," insisted Garfield. "It is always better to right a wrong as soon as you discover it, and I would rather walk the four miles in the mud and rain than disappoint one of my scholars. Sometimes example is more powerful than precept, and if I am not careful to live an honest life before my pupils, they will not give much heed to what I say on such subjects. There is no rule like the golden rule, but he who teaches it must also live it, if he expects others to follow his teaching."

Mrs. Ross said no more, and James went on, as he had proposed; and before the little boy went to sleep, he was happy again in the possession of his treasure, over which he had been lamenting all the evening. The young teacher declined the hospitality of the family for the night, and walked back in the darkness to his boarding-house, and, as he afterward said, felt all the better for standing up to his principles.--_Selected_.

A SPELLING-BEE

"I am going to have a spelling-bee tonight," said Uncle John, "and I will give a pair of skates to the the boy who can spell man best."

The children turned and stared into one another's eyes.

"Spell 'man' best, Uncle John? Why, there is only one way!" they cried.

"There are all sorts of ways," replied Uncle John. "I will leave you to think of it awhile," and he b.u.t.toned up his coat and went away.

"What does he mean?" asked Bob.

"I think it is a joke," said Harry, thoughtfully; "and when Uncle John asks me, I am going to say, 'Why, m-a-n, of course.'"

"It is a conundrum, I know," said Joe; and he leaned his head on his hand and settled down to think.

Time went slowly to the puzzled boys, for all their fun that day. It seemed as if "after supper-time" would never come; but it came at last, and Uncle John came, too, with a s.h.i.+ny skate runner peeping out of his coat pocket.

Uncle John did not delay; he sat down and looked straight into Harry's eyes.