“How do you happen to know so much about the Board of Sunday Schools, J.W.?” asked Mr. Drury.

“Oh, that’s easy.  You know how it is in our Sunday school:  they don’t make one or two of us young fellows serve as librarians and secretaries and such and miss all the class work:  they have more help, and we all get into class for the lesson.  Well, two years ago Dad told me you had nominated me for something at the annual Sunday school meeting.  It was only a sort of assistant secretary’s job, but very soon I began to catch on, and I’ve seen a lot of the letters and leaflets that come from the Board in Chicago.  Well, let me tell you that Board of Sunday Schools is a whale of a machine.  Why, it’s the whole church at work to make better Sunday schools, and more of ’em.  They have Sunday school workers in all sorts of wild places, and Sunday school missionaries in foreign lands.  Yes, and last year I happened to meet one of their secretaries, at your house, you may remember.  But you’d never think he was just a secretary, he was so keen and wide awake.  He knew the Boy Scouts from A to Z, and that got me, ’cause I’m not so old that I’ve forgotten my scouting.  And he knew baseball, and boys’ books, and all that.  Don’t you think, Brother Drury, if more of the fellows knew what the real Sunday school work is they would take to it like colts to a bran mash?”

“They couldn’t help it,” said the pastor.  “And you may have noticed that your father and the other people of our Sunday School Board are trying to get them to find out some of the things you have found out.  For instance, you know what the two organized classes of high-school freshmen are doing, and the other organized classes.  Seems to me their members are finding out that Sunday school is something big and fine.”

“That they are,” Mrs. Farwell agreed, “and you mustn’t forget my wonderful class of young married women, and the men’s class of nearly a hundred.  I think our Sunday school has really begun to change the ideas of a lot of people.  Just think how little trouble we have now with what Graded Lessons we have, and how happy all our teachers are because they have the helps they need for just the sort of pupils that are in their classes.”

“That’s so,” said J.W., Sr.  “I don’t suppose even old Brother Barnacle, ‘sot’ as he is, would vote to go back to the times when the superintendent reviewed the lesson the same way the teachers taught it, from a printed list of questions.  Seems as if I can hear Henry J. Locke yet—­his farm joins ours down by the creek—­when he conducted the reviewing at Deep Creek.  He would hold his quarterly at arm’s length to favor his eyes, and then look up from it to the school and shoot the question at everybody, ‘And what did Peter do then, hey?’ He sure did come out strong on Peter; but I’ll say this for him, that he never skipped a question from start to finish.”

All three laughed a little over Henry J. Locke, and then the pastor said he mustn’t stay much longer.  But he did want to back up J.W.’s belief that what Phil Khamis had said was true of everybody—­we are all debtors.