They have their meaning,--they do not-live in
vain,--but they are windfalls. I am convinced that many healthy children
are injured morally by being forced to read too much about these little
meek sufferers and their spiritual exercises. Here is a boy that loves
to run, swim, kick football, turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish,
tear his clothes, coast, skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut
his name on fences, read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat
the widest-angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts
with his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names, throw
stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut behind"
anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, "holler" Fire!
on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or,
in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or whatever it may be;--isn't
that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the
matter with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you
put into such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's
hand a sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin,
white-faced child, whose life is really as much a training for death as
the last month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in
common between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes
when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of
resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those
who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
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