A FEW days since, I was visiting the aged inmates of a workhouse infirmary. In one of the beds sat a little old woman with a bright, pleasant face. She repeated many verses of Scripture to me, and appeared to enjoy them thoroughly.
I remarked, “God has blessed you with a good memory.”
She said, “Yes, ma’am, He has, but then I tries to remember. I often thinks of what a lady said to me years agone. She said, ‘When you reads think of a coe. What does a coe do? It eats all it wants, and then it goes, and it lies down, and it chaws the cood.’ And than the lady said, Now you should be like the coe. Don’t forget when you reads, don’t shut up the Book and forget all about it, but be like the coe and chaw the cood.’”
I said, “That was good advice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she answered, “it was good advice, and I have chawed the cood many a time after reading, and now when I lies awake of a night, as I often does, I says over my verses out of my Bible and my hymns, and they are a great comfort to me.”
May we not all take a lesson from these simple words? Are we not all far too apt to read and forget, to close our book, and forget to “chaw the cood”? H. L. T.