"I can't be a very bad boy," thought he, "or she would not have liked me. Mr. Nason used to say he could tell an ugly horse by the looks of his eye; and the schoolmaster last winter picked out all the bad boys at a glance. I can't be a very bad boy, or she would have found me out. I _know_ I am not a bad boy. I feel right, and try to do right."
Harry's investigation invested Julia Bryant with a thousand poetical excellences. That she felt an interest in him--one so good as she--was enough to confirm all the noble resolutions he had made, and give him strength to keep them; and as he seated himself by the brook, he thought over his faults, and renewed his determination to uproot them from his character. His meeting with the "little angel," as he chose to regard her, was an oasis in the desert--a place where his moral nature could drink the pure waters of life.
No one had ever before seemed to care much whether he was a good boy or a bad boy. The minister used now and then to give him a dry lecture; but he did not seem to feel any real interest in him. He was minister, and of course he must preach; not that he cared whether a pauper boy was a saint or a sinner, but only to do the work he was hired to do, and earn his money.
Julia did not preach. Her sweet face was the "beauty of holiness." She hoped he was not a bad boy. She liked a good boy; and this was incentive enough to incur a lifetime of trial and self-sacrifice. Harry was an orphan. To have one feel an interest in his moral welfare, to have one wish him to be a good boy, had not grown stale by long continuance. He had known no anxious mother, who wished him to be good, who would weep when he did wrong. The sympathy of the little angel touched a sensitive chord in his heart and soul, and he felt that he should go forward in the great pilgrimage of life with a new desire to be true to himself, and true to her who had inspired his reverence.
Even a child cannot be good without having it felt by others. "She hoped he was not a bad boy," were the words of the little angel; and before she returned from her errand of mercy, he repeated them to himself a hundred times. They were a talisman to him, and he was sure he should never be a bad boy in the face of such a wish.