“No, grandmother, indeed I have not,” replied Ned; and he told her how it had happened.

His grandmother said that he was a good boy to have acted as he did, and added, “It makes me happier to find that you behave well, than twenty new cloaks would.”

The next day, at dinner time, when Ned went into the little outhouse where he and Tom usually ate this meal, he found Tom sitting there crying.

“What makes you cry, Tom?” inquired Ned.

“Because I have no dinner,” was the reply.

“How happens that?” asked Ned.

“Because, now father’s out of work, mother says she can only give us two meals a-day.  I only had a little bit of bread this morning; and I shall have nothing else till I go home in the evening, and then she will give me a cold potato or two.”

Ned’s grandmother had given him that day for his dinner a large slice of bread, and a piece of cold bacon.  Ned had been working hard, and was very hungry.  He could have eaten all the bread and bacon with pleasure, and felt certain that if he had got no dinner and Tom had, Tom would not have given him any of his.  He recollected that Tom had never in his life shown him any kindness; that, a fortnight ago, when Tom had had four apples given him, he had eaten them all himself, without even offering him part of one; and, above all, he called to mind that Tom was in all probability the person who had robbed him of his apricots, and killed his favourite apricot-tree.

But he remembered our Saviour’s command, “Do good to them that hate you;” and though Tom was a bad boy, yet it grieved Ned to see him crying with hunger, whilst he himself had food to eat.  So he divided both the bread and the bacon into two equal shares, with his knife, and then, going up to Tom, gave him one portion, and desired him to eat it.  Tom looked at Ned in some surprise, and then, taking the food that was offered him, ate it in a ravenous manner, without saying a word.

“He might just have thanked me,” thought Ned to himself; but he forbore to tell Tom so.

Ned always read a chapter in the Bible to his grandmother every night when he came home from work.  It happened that this evening the chapter fixed on was the twelfth of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.  He was much struck by one of the verses in it:  “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink:  for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.”

“Grandmother,” said Ned, when he had concluded the chapter, “I understand the first part of this verse very well, it is plain enough; but what is meant by the words, ’for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head?’”

His grandmother replied, that this passage had once puzzled her; but that an old lady with whom she had lived when she was a girl, and who kindly took great pains in explaining different parts of the Bible that were hard to be understood, had made this quite clear to her.