Much the same may be said of Farmer Pitcairn and his wife.  Possibly there is an additional wrinkle or two on their homely faces, but their hearts are as genial and as kindly as ever.  They love Tom Gordon as if he were their own son, and he fully returns the affection they feel for him.

And how has it been with Tom during those four years?

Well, he has had his shadow and sunshine, like the rest of us, but there has been far more of the latter than the former.  How could it be otherwise, when I tell you that he has stood as firm as a rock upon the principles that were implanted in his heart and soul by his noble mother?  He could never forget her teachings, which were added to by other wise and good persons with whom he was thrown in contact later.

Now, Tom Gordon became what I call a healthy, sensible Christian youth.  He was not the good boy we used to read about in the Sunday-school books, who mopes around, forever preaching a sermon whenever he opens his lips, and finding a “lesson” in everything, even the leap of a grasshopper.  When those boys become so good that they can be no better, they generally lie down, call all their playmates around them, deliver a farewell sermon, and then depart.  The mistake of that sort of life is that it makes religion unattractive.  It gives the idea that “the good die young,” and that a jolly, genial, fun-loving boy, bubbling over sometimes with mischief, cannot be a Christian, when he is the very one that most pleases his heavenly Father.

Tom had his fun, his enjoyment, and now and then his crosses.  Such things are inevitable and must be looked for.  A thorn appeared in his side from the first.  A young clerk that had entered the store a few weeks ahead of him was a sly, mean, gnarly fellow, who showed a dislike to the new-comer and annoyed him in every way possible.  He was larger and apparently stronger than Tom, and seemed determined to provoke a quarrel with him.

Tom would have been glad to challenge him to a bout at fisticuffs, for he was confident he could vanquish him in short order.  He often yearned to do so.  More than once the hot defiance was tugging at his lips; but the memory of poor Jim Travers’s parting words, “Tom, try to be better:  I tell you, you won’t be sorry when you come to die,” restrained the angry utterance and the hasty blow.

Max Zeigler was one of those young men that are inherently mean.  He was born that way, and his ugly disposition increased with his years.  You occasionally meet such persons, whose nature it seems impossible to affect by any method of treatment.  What was specially aggravating in Tom Gordon’s place was that Zeigler seemed to feel no dislike of any one in the store besides himself.  He slurred him the first day he met him, and kept it up unremittingly.