Tip Lewis and His Lamp | Page 3

story.
"I haven't time, boys, to tell you all the gentleman said, but, after that talk, Robert began to think about these things a great deal, and pretty soon he learned to read the Bible and to pray. That was more than fifty years ago. He is an old minister now; I have heard him preach a great many times; and he told me once he should always believe God put it into his heart to turn to the right that evening, instead of the left."
"Oh!" exclaimed Tip, just here; and Miss Perry stopped.
"Joe pinched me," said Tip, to explain his part of the noise.
But their teacher felt very badly; they had not listened to her story as though they cared to hear it; they had slid up and down the seat, pulled and pinched and pricked each other, and done a great many mischievous things since she commenced; and yet now and then they seemed to hear a few words; so she kept on, because she did not know what else to do.
"Oh, Mr. Parker," she said, when the school was dismissed, and her noisy class had scrambled, some through the window and some through the door, "some man who understands boys ought to have had that class; I haven't done them any good, but I tried;" and there were tears in her eyes as she spoke.
"You did what you could," said the superintendent kindly; "none of us can do more."
Some loving voice ought to have whispered in that teacher's ear, "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."
CHAPTER II.
"But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit."
Tip Lewis yawned and stretched, and finally opened his eyes rather late on Monday morning.
"Oh, bother!" he said, with another yawn, when he saw how the sun was pouring into the room; "I suppose a fellow has got to get up. I wish getting up wasn't such hard work,--spoils all the fun of going to bed; but then the old cat will be to pay, if I don't get around soon."
And with this he rolled out; and when he was dressed, which was in a very few minutes after he tumbled out of his ragged bed, he was the self-same Tip who had been at the bottom of most of the mischief in Miss Perry's class the day before,--the very same, from the curly hair, not yet combed nor likely to be, down to the bare, soiled feet.
The bed which he had just left, so far as neatness was concerned, looked very much like Tip, and the room looked like the bed; and they all looked about as badly as dust and rags and poverty could make them look.
After running his fingers through his hair, by way of finishing his toilet, Tip made his way down the rickety stairs to the kitchen.
It seemed as though that kitchen was just calculated to make a boy feel cross. The table stood against the wall on its three legs, the tablecloth was daubed with molasses and stained with gravy; a plate, with something in it which looked like melted lard, but which Tip's mother called butter, and a half loaf of bread, were the only eatable articles as yet on the table; and around these the flies had gathered in such numbers, that it almost seemed as though they might carry the loaf away entirely, if too many of them didn't drown themselves in the butter. Over all the July sun poured in its rays from the eastern window, the only one in the room.
Tip stumbled over his father's boots, and made his way to the stove, where his mother was bending over a spider of sizzling pork.
"Well," she said, as he came near, "did you get up for all day? I'd be ashamed--great boy like you--to lie in bed till this time of day, and let your mother split wood and bring water to cook your breakfast with."
"You cooked, a little for you, too, didn't you?" asked Tip, in a saucy, good-natured tone. "Where's father?"
"Just where you have been all day so far,--in bed and asleep. Such folks as I've got! I'm sick of living."
And Mrs. Lewis stepped back from the steaming tea-kettle, and wiped great beads of perspiration from her forehead; then fanned herself with her big apron, looking meantime very tired and cross.
Yet Tip's mother was not so cross after all as she seemed; had Tip only known it, her heart was very heavy that morning. She did not blame his father for his morning nap, not a bit of it; she was only glad that the weary frame could rest a little after a night of pain. She had been up since the first grey dawn of morning, bathing