Three People Part 20

So he put a clean white cloth on the dry-goods box in honor of this new bright day, arranged everything in the most tempting manner possible, and waited for customers. They came thick and fast. The Sabbath proved fair to be as busy a day at the dry-goods box as it used to be at the Euclid House. One disappointment Tode had. When he trudged down to the little house to have his great empty coffee-pot replenished, it was closed and locked.

"Course," he said, nodding approvingly, "they've gone to church. I might a known they wouldn't wash and iron and go to school Sunday. I ought to remembered and took away my coffee. Well, never mind, I'll just run around to the Coffee House and get my dish filled, and that will make it all right."

So many customers came just at tea time that he found it impossible to go home to tea, but took a cup of his own coffee and a few of his cakes, and chuckled meantime over the fact that he was the only individual who could take his supper from that dry-goods box without paying for it.

It was just as the bells were ringing for evening service that he joyfully packed his nearly emptied dishes into the basket, shook the crumbs from his little table-cloth, folded it carefully, and rejoiced over the thought that he had done an excellent day's work, and could afford to go to church. The brown house was closed again, so he left his basket under a woodpile in the alley-way, and made all possible speed for Mr. Birge's church. Even then the opening services were nearly concluded, but he was in time for the Bible text, and that text Tode never forgot in his life. The words were, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy."

I can not describe to you the poor boy's bewildered astonishment as he listened and thought, and gradually began to take in something of the true meaning of those earnest words. Mr. Birge was very decided in his opinions, very plain in his utterances. Milk wagons, ice wagons, meat wagons, and the whole long catalogue of Sabbath-breaking wagons, to say nothing of row-boats and steamboats, and trains of cars, were dwelt upon with unsparing tongue--nay, he went farther than that, and expressed his unmistakable opinion of Sabbath-breaking ice-cream saloons and coffee saloons; then down to the little apple children, and candy children, and shoestring children, who haunt the Sabbath streets. Tode listened, and ran his fingers through his hair in perplexity.

"It must come in _somewhere_," he said to himself in some bewilderment.

"I don't quite keep a coffee house, and I don't--why, yes I do, sell apples every now and then; and as to that, I suppose I keep a coffee _box_. What if it ain't a house? I wonder now if it ain't right? I wonder if there's lots of things that look right before you think about them, that ain't right after you've turned 'em over a spell? And I wonder how a fellow is going to know?"

Then he gave his undivided attention to the sermon again; and went home after the service was concluded, with a very thoughtful face. Jim was there making a visit, but Tode only nodded to him, and went abruptly to the little shelf behind the stove in the corner, and took down the old Bible.

"Grandma, where are the commandments put?" he asked eagerly, addressing the old lady by the t.i.tle which he had bestowed on her very early in their acquaintance.

"Why they're in Exodus, in the twentieth chapter."

"And where's Exodus?"

"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 G.o.d: 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."

Presently he and Jim climbed up to the little room over the kitchen. No sooner were they alone than Tode commenced on a subject that had puzzled him.

"I say, Jim, how comes it that you knew all about those things and never told _me_? That's treating a fellow pretty mean, I think. I always shared the peanuts and things I got with you."

"See here," answered Jim, in open-eyed wonder; "what are you driving at?"

"Why, _things_ that you know and never told me. Here your mother has got a Bible, and you know verses in it, and know about heaven, and all, and you never told me a word."

Jim sat down on the foot of the bed and laughed, long and loud and merrily.

"I don't know, Tode, whether you're cracked, or what is the matter with you," he said at last, when he could speak, "but I never heard a fellow mixing up peanuts and heaven before."

Tode was someway not in a mood to be laughed at, so he gave vent somewhat loftily to a solemn truth.

"Oh well, if you're a mind to think that the peanuts is of the most consequence after all, why I don't know as I object."

And then the boy deliberately knelt down and began his evening prayer.

He was too ignorant to know that there were boys who thought it unmanly to pray. It never occurred to him to omit his kneeling. As for Jim he felt himself in a very strange position. He kicked his heels against the bedpost for awhile, but presently he grew ashamed of that, and contented himself with very noisily making ready for bed. Tode, when he rose, was in a softened mood, and as he blew out the light said:

"I wish you knew how to pray, Jim. I do, honestly, it's so nice."

"Praying and brandy bottles don't go together," answered his companion, shortly.

"No more they don't," said Tode, emphatically. "I had to quit that business myself."

If some of our respectable brandy-drinking, brandy-selling deacons _could_ have heard those two ignorant boys talk!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XV.

EXIT TODE MALL.

On went the brisk and busy days; the soft air of summer was upon them, and still the business at the dry-goods box flourished, and was taking on fresh importance with every pa.s.sing day. The people were almost numberless who grew into the habit of stopping at the little box, to be waited on by the briskest and sharpest of boys to delicious coffee and cookies, or as the days grew warmer to a gla.s.s of iced lemonade, or a saucer of glowing strawberries. The matter was putting on the semblance of a partners.h.i.+p concern, for the old lady rivaled the bakery with her cookies, both as regarded taste and economy; and in due course of time Winny caught the infection, studied half a leaf of an old receipt-book which came wrapped around an ounce of alum, and finally took to compounding a mixture, which being duly baked and carefully watched by the mother's practiced eye, developed into distracting little cream cakes, which met with most astonis.h.i.+ng sales.

Meantime there were many spare half hours in the course of the long days, which were devoted to the puzzling grammar and arithmetic, and gradually light was beginning to dawn over not only the addition but the subtraction table; or, more properly speaking, the addition circle. Tode nightly chuckled over his invention as he started from a new figure and raced glibly around to the climax, thereby calling forth the unqualified approbation of Winny, not unmixed now and then with a certain curious air of admiration at his rapid strides around the mystic circle. In fact, things were progressing. Tode began to pride himself on making change correctly and rapidly; began to wonder, supposing he had a one hundred dollar bill to change, could he do it as rapidly _almost_ as that man at the bank? Began to grow very ambitious, and in looking through his arithmetic in search of nouns and verbs, chanced to alight on the word "interest;" read about it, plied Winny with questions, some of which she could answer and some not, went for further information to the older brother who was at work at the livery stable. The result of all of which was that our rising young street vagrant opened an account at the savings bank, and had money at interest! By the way, his trip to the livery stable revived his slumbering ambition in regard to horses, and thenceforth he spent his regular "nooning" in that vicinity, or mounted on one of the coach boxes with the "brother," who chanced to be one of the finest drivers on the list. Not a very commendable locality in which to spend his leisure, you think? That depends----. Tode's happened, fortunately, to be much the stronger mind of the two; and besides, you remember the guide which mounted guard in his jacket pocket. He found it in accordance not only with one of the famous rules, viz: "Learn everything that _is_ to be learned about everything that I possibly can," but also in accordance with his inclination to learn to drive; so learn he did, although his desire to become Mr. Hastings'

coachman had merged itself into a desire to own a complete little coffee house like the one around the corner from him, with veritable shelves and drawers, and a till to lock his money in.

You think it a wonder that Tode never fell back into his old wretched street vagrant rum-cellar life. Well, I don't know. What was there to fall back to? I can't think it so charming a thing to be kicked around like a football, to be half the time nearly frozen, and all the time nearly starved, that people should tumble lovingly back into the gutter from which they have once emerged, unless indeed one resigns his will to the keeping of that demon who peoples the most of our gutters, which thing, you remember, Tode did not do. Besides, be it also remembered that the loving Lord had called this boy, and made ready a mansion in the Eternal City for him, and is it so strange a thing that the Lord can keep his _own_?

It chanced one day that two coffee drinkers at his stand lingered and talked freely about a certain lecture that was to be delivered before the----. Tode didn't catch what society, and didn't care; but he did learn the fact that Mr. Birge was to be the speaker. Now there had come into this boy's heart a strong love for Mr. Birge; he had never spoken to him in his life, but for all that Tode knew him well, nodded complacently to himself whenever he chanced to meet Mr. Birge on the street, and always pointed him out as his minister. Very speedily was his resolution taken to attend this lecture. He didn't know the subject, and indeed that was a matter of very slight moment to him. Whatever was the subject he felt sure of its being a fine one, since Mr. Birge had chosen it. Well he went, and as the lecture was delivered before one of the benevolent societies of the city, the subject was the broad and strong one, "Christian Giving." Tode came home with some new and startling ideas. He burst into the little kitchen where the mother sat placidly knitting her stockings, and the daughter sat knitting her brows over her arithmetic lesson, and p.r.o.nounced his important query:

"Winny, what's tenths?"

"What's what?"

"Tenths. In counting money, you know, or anything. How much is tenths?"