“Oh, yes,” nodded Pollyanna, emphatically.  “He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count ’em.  He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it—­some.  And father felt ashamed that he hadn’t done it more.  After that, they got to be such a comfort to him, you know, when things went wrong; when the Ladies’ Aiders got to fight—­I mean, when they didn’t agree about something,” corrected Pollyanna, hastily.  “Why, it was those texts, too, father said, that made him think of the game—­he began with me on the crutches—­but he said ’twas the rejoicing texts that started him on it.”

“And what game might that be?” asked the minister.

“About finding something in everything to be glad about, you know.  As I said, he began with me on the crutches.”  And once more Pollyanna told her story—­this time to a man who listened with tender eyes and understanding ears.

A little later Pollyanna and the minister descended the hill, hand in hand.  Pollyanna’s face was radiant.  Pollyanna loved to talk, and she had been talking now for some time:  there seemed to be so many, many things about the game, her father, and the old home life that the minister wanted to know.

At the foot of the hill their ways parted, and Pollyanna down one road, and the minister down another, walked on alone.

In the Rev. Paul Ford’s study that evening the minister sat thinking.  Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of paper—­his sermon notes.  Under the suspended pencil in his fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank—­his sermon to be.  But the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or of what he intended to write.  In his imagination he was far away in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor, sick, worried, and almost alone in the world—­but who was poring over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had told him to “rejoice and be glad.”

After a time, with a long sigh, the Rev. Paul Ford roused himself, came back from the far Western town, and adjusted the sheets of paper under his hand.

“Matthew twenty-third; 13—­14 and 23,” he wrote; then, with a gesture of impatience, he dropped his pencil and pulled toward him a magazine left on the desk by his wife a few minutes before.  Listlessly his tired eyes turned from paragraph to paragraph until these words arrested them: 

“A father one day said to his son, Tom, who, he knew, had refused to fill his mother’s woodbox that morning:  ’Tom, I’m sure you’ll be glad to go and bring in some wood for your mother.’  And without a word Tom went.  Why?  Just because his father showed so plainly that he expected him to do the right thing.  Suppose he had said:  ’Tom, I overheard what you said to your mother this morning, and I’m ashamed of you.  Go at once and fill that woodbox!’ I’ll warrant that woodbox, would be empty yet, so far as Tom was concerned!”