Peanuts, cigars, a pack of cards, and a bowie-knife!  Imagine yourself, teacher, to be seated before your orderly and courteous class of boys next Sunday morning and find them transformed into beings represented by such surroundings as these!  It was Mrs. Partridge’s experience.  How fascinating that story is!  That one incorrigible boy, the one with the bowie-knife, the one who would make no answer to her questions, show no interest in her stories, ignore her very presence and go on with his horrible mischief, until it even came to a stabbing affray right there in the class-room!

Imagine her meeting that boy ten years afterward, when he was not only a man, but a gentleman; not only that, but a Christian and not only that, but a working Christian, superintending a mission Sunday-school, giving his best energies and his best time to work like that!  Think of being told by him that the determination to amount to something was taken that morning, ten years before, when he seemed not to be listening nor caring!  What is ten years of Christian work when we can hope for such results as that!

Flossy had forgotten her charge; her face was all aglow; so was her heart.  She knew more about Christian work than she did an hour before.  She had learned that we must take the step that plainly comes next to be taken, no matter for the darkness of the day and the apparent gloom of the future. Work is ours; results are God’s.  This life business is divided.  Partnership with God.  Nothing but the work to do; so that it is done to the utmost limit of our best, the responsibility is the Lord’s.  That was blessed!  She could dare to try.

Meantime the boy.  He had listened in utmost silence, and with eyes that never for an instant left the speaker’s face!  When the spell was broken he drew a long sigh, and this was his mighty conclusion.

“That chap was enough sight meaner than I’d ever be, and yet he got to be some!  I’ll be blamed if I don’t see what can be done in that line!”

A small beginning; so small that on Flossy’s face it excited only smiles.  She was ignorant, you know.  To Mrs. Partridge that sentence would have been worth a wedge of gold.  But it is possible that Flossy’s first simple little reach after work may have fruit to bear.

It is difficult to begin to tell about that next day at Chautauqua.  There was so much crowded into it that it would almost make a little book of itself.  The morning was spent by a large class of people in a state of excited unrest and expectancy.  The sensible ones by the hundreds, and indeed I suppose I may say by the thousands, went to the morning service, as usual, and heard the children’s sermon, delivered by Dr. Newton; and those who did not, and who afterward had the misfortune to fall in with those who did, bemoaned their folly in not doing likewise.  On the whole, the children, and those who had brains enough to become children for the time being, were the only comfortable ones at Chautauqua that Saturday morning.