JOHN'S OBJECT LESSON.



JOHN had been to church and heard an eloquent sermon from the text, "He that soweth in tears shall reap in joy;  "but somehow the discourse made very little impression on him.

But on Monday, John fell from the top rail of a fence and broke his leg, and was taken home crying and writhing with pain, and set down in a chair, to wait for the doctor: ... While he sat there, it came to him as 'if it had been written upon the wall in letters of fire,’ 

"John, don’t be a coward!"

The doctor came and in the tedious old-fashioned way, pulled and pinched and wrenched and worried himself into, a great sweat, setting the poor little fellow's leg. But he, the owner of the broken leg, sat there, like Wellington at Waterloo, pale and faint, but like a rock; making no noise, holding the quivering and throbbing leg firmly up to the old doctor's trembling hands. And as the trial went on, he saw his father's eye kindle, with a look of pride, and his mother turned her face to brush the tears from her cheeks, and his two sisters "nestled up to him, as if to say, "Here, is a brother fit to be a hero." And when he lay on his bed week after week, while the broken leg was getting Well, he noticed how everybody treated him with a sort of respect as if he were a grown man, and when he went back to school, the teacher took his hand with peculiar grip, and the whole World was different after that day from the world before the doctor came to set the leg! John didn't understand it all then, but now he understands what its all meant that the hardest path in this world if followed resolutely to the end will lead a boy or a man to the noble things of life.  

 But it does not require a broken limb to make a hero of any boy or girl. Only meet bravely the obstacles and little fretting things that come in your way every day and be not ruled by them; and, you may be a hero as well as John!



I. A. B.