For at Sadie's Sunday school you did not get a prize for the new scholars you brought in on Canvassing Day. You got a prize when the next Canvassing Day came around, if they were still there. And Canvassing Day was nearly here again, and her scholars were failing her.
"It's no easy thing to be a Methodist," she said in one of her moments of respite from a little sister, talking about it with pride through her gloom. "You work for all you get! When I could look my scholars up every week, and go by for 'em with Tom and the barouche when the weather was bad, I had them there for roll-call every Sunday. But now that I have to hold my little sisters and we haven't Tom or the barouche either because on account of my little sisters we can't afford them, they've backslid and dropped out."
Hattie had data as to that, too. "You needn't be so bitter about it, Sadie. I know you mean me! You went around and picked your scholars up anywhere you could find 'em, and I did too. It wasn't as if any one of 'em had a call to your Sunday school. Or as if they had a conviction. Except Mamie Sessums whose conviction took her away."
Sadie spoke even more bitterly. "You needn't count on Mamie. Because she had had a conviction that took her away from where she was, I counted on her the most of any of mine."
Hattie was positive. "But the conviction she has now took her away from yours. Her mother thinks there is too much about falling from grace at your Sunday school; she doesn't think it nice for little girls to hear so much about sin."
"She wouldn't have fallen from grace herself if I could have kept after her," from Sadie. "If I hadn't to hold my little sisters Mamie wouldn't be a backslider now. But my little sisters will be justified to me yet. I'm not going back on prayer."
It all emphasized the need of exceeding caution in prayer. Emmy Lou never had thought of it so. Time was, in fact, when, praying her "Gentle Jesus," at Aunt Cordelia's knee, she poured it out in Aunt Cordelia's lap, so to speak, and left it there. Not that Aunt Cordelia had not made her understand that prayer goes to God. But that Aunt Cordelia who attended to everything else for her would see about getting it there.
But that was when Emmy Lou was a baby thing, and God the nebulous center of a more nebulous setting, with the kindly and cheery aspect as well as the ivory beard of---- Was it Dr. Angell, the rector of St. Simeon's? Or was there in the background of Emmy Lou's memory a yet more patriarchal face, reverent through benignity, with flowing ivory beard? A memory antedating her acquaintance with Dr. Angell? She was a big girl now, and God was not quite so nebulous nor quite so cheery. His ivory beard was longer, and in the midst of nebulæ for support was a throne. But He yet could be depended on to be kindly. Aunt Cordelia was authority for that.