"O, might I hear thy heavenly tongue But whisper, 'Thou art mine!' Those gentle words should raise my song To notes almost divine."
Mr. B. put his apple and knife down, and took his red bandanna handkerchief from under his plate, and, wiping his eyes, said:
"Hymns always make me feel a good deal, especially Watts's. I've read that hymn in meeting before the exercises began."
_Pastor._ You know, by happy experience, what it is when that heavenly tongue whispers, "Thou art mine."
_Pastor._ Now, my dear friends, there is something awaiting you, which you seem not to have experienced, but which is as good as that.
"We would like to hear about it," they both replied.
"How should you like, Mrs. B.," said I, "to have your little boy become a sailor?"
"O dear!" said she, "I should have no peace from this time, if I thought he was to be a sailor."
"But that," said I, "may be God's chosen occupation for him,--the way in which he will employ him to bring him to himself, and then use him to be a preacher to seamen, for example, and so to scatter the truth in many parts of the earth. We are not our own, Mrs. B., and this dear boy was not given you, as we say, to keep. 'For thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.'"
"I want him brought up at college," said Mrs. B., looking at your mother, who, she probably thought, would understand her motherly anticipations about her boy so far ahead.
"Well," said I, "let us send him to college. I suspect that you would feel a good deal the morning he left you, would you not?"
"O," said she, "I should so want him to be good first! If he should not be a good man, I would not have him get learning to do harm with it, and make himself more miserable hereafter."
The little gate, with its chain and ball, swung to at this moment, and a woman and girl came up the walk. It was Mrs. Ford, who used to be your dress-maker, and her daughter Janette, now about thirteen. It was a farewell call from Janette, who was going to the neighborhood of Philadelphia, into a coach-lace manufactory.
"So Janette is going to leave us, to-morrow, Mrs. Ford?" said your mother.
"Yes, madam, and I feel sorely about it; so young, and such a way off, and all strangers except the foreman, who spoke to me about her coming! O, sir," said she, changing her undertone, and turning to me, "what should we do without that promise, 'I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee'?"