But catch the horse we must, for we were bound to be at church, though jute then we did not feel at all devotional.  We resolved, therefore, with the boy, to run her down; so, by the way of making an animated start, we slung the pail at the horse’s head, and put out on a Sunday morning horse-race.  Every time she stood at the other end of the field waiting for us to come up.  She trotted, galloped and careered about us, with an occasional neigh cheerfully given to encourage us in the pursuit.  We were getting more unprepared in body, mind and soul for the sanctuary.  Meanwhile, quite a household audience lined the fence; the children and visitors shouting like excited Romans in an amphitheatre at a contest with wild beasts, and it was uncertain whether the audience was in sympathy with us or the bay mare.

At this unhappy juncture, she who some years ago took us for “better or for worse” came to the rescue, finding us in the latter condition.  She advanced to the field with a wash-basin full of water, offering that as sole inducement, and gave one call, when the horse went out to meet her, and under a hand, not half as strong as ours, gripping the mane, the refractory beast was led to the manger.

Standing with our feet in the damp grass and our new clothes wet to a sop, we learned then and there how much depends on the way you do a thing.  The proposition we made to the bay mare was far better than that offered by our companion; but ours failed and hers succeeded.  Not the first nor the last time that a wash-basin has beaten a pail.  So some of us go all through life clumsily coaxing and awkwardly pursuing things which we want to halter and control.  We strain every nerve, only to find ourselves befooled and left far behind, while some Christian man or woman comes into the field, and by easy art captures that which evaded us.

We heard a good sermon that day, but it was no more impressive than the besweated lesson of the pasture-field, which taught us that no more depends upon the thing you do than upon the way you do it.  The difference between the clean swath of that harvester in front of our house and the ragged work of his neighbor is in the way he swings the scythe, and not in the scythe itself.  There are ten men with one talent apiece who do more good than the one man with ten talents.  A basin properly lifted may accomplish more than a pail unskillfully swung.  A minister for an hour in his sermon attempts to chase down those brutish in their habits, attempting to fetch them under the harness of Christian restraint, and perhaps miserably fails, when some gentle hand of sisterly or motherly affection laid upon the wayward one brings him safely in.

There is a knack in doing things.  If all those who plough in State and Church had known how to hold the handles, and turn a straight furrow, and stop the team at the end of the tiled, the world would long ago have been ploughed into an Eden.  What many people want is gumption—­a word as yet undefined; but if you do not know what it means, it is very certain you do not possess the quality it describes.  We all need to study Christian tact.  The boys in the Baskinridge school-house laughed at William L. Dayton’s impediment of speech, but that did not hinder him from afterward making court-room and senate-chamber thrill under the spell of his words.