Yet NOT USELESS. 



THERE died lately in a Western State a blind brush-maker, whose story is worth telling for the truth it illustrates and the practical lesson it conveys.

At the age of sixteen, John B. was a bright, ambitious, hopeful student in an Ohio college. His parents being poor, he worked on the farm in summer to pay for his winter's schooling. He was an earnest follower of Christ, and it was his intention to become a missionary, and he hoped to go into the field in Africa, his attention having been drawn to that field of Christian labor.

A violent attack of fever destroyed his health and left him with a disease of the eyes, which in a year's time rendered him stone-blind.

Whatever the boy suffered in this destruction of all his earthly hopes, he kept to himself. He was outwardly the same cheerful, light-hearted fellow.

As soon as he had strength, he began to learn brush-making, and supported himself by that trade. A year after he was established at it, he began to gather into his little shop on Sundays the boys whom he found on the river wharves, to teach and talk to them.

This work he continued for thirty years, until the time of his death.  He had a peculiar aptitude for interesting lads, and the experience of his own life gave a force and pungency to his appeals which they would have lacked coming from other men.

But he was in the habit of regarding his life's work as utterly destroyed by his misfortune.

When he died, a letter came from one of the most influential and wisest statesmen of our country; a man whose strength has urged many a reform which has helped to elevate and civilize the nation.

"Whatever I am," he said, "and whatever I have done, I owe, under God, to John B. It was he who took me out of the slough, and made a man of me."

Let no boy who reads this be discouraged by any circumstance, however hard. If God forbids you to plant an oak, plant an herb. It is he who will give the increase, and only the future can tell how great the harvest will be.


"Do thou thy work; it shall succeed

In thine or In another's day; 

And if denied the victor's reed,

Thou shalt not miss the toiler's pay."





Youth's Companion.