AS I was looking at a picturesque mud cottage, an old man on a pony rode up to me. “You seem interested in this old cottage, sir,” said he. “It has stood many a year, and from it I married my wife.”
“Indeed! then that was a good while ago. I wonder if she was the old lady whom I visited in the cottage some years gone by, and who seemed to be dying.”
“My wife,” he said, “is living yet, but, like me, she is old. You see, I am over eighty, and we moved away from close by here some years ago.”
“And where will be your next move?” I asked.
“We sha’n’t move no more,” he said.
“Well, we must all move soon—will your move be to heaven?”
The old man changed his tone. He drew his pony a trifle closer. “Sir,” he said, “about here there is a many who don’t believe in such things, but I do. I learned them when I was ten years of age, at the Sunday school: there our clergyman taught us texts and chapters of Scripture. And I can say ‘em now. I can say the fifty-third of Isaiah to you.”
“And a grand chapter it is!” I broke in. “‘He was wounded for our transgressions—and by His stripes we are healed.’ Can you, too, say, ‘By His stripes I am healed’?”
“I’ll say it to ye,” the old man continued, occupied with the chapter. Then, bending his head over the pony, and looking me direct in the face, he went through it verse by verse. I again made a remark as he neared the end, to which he replied, “There’s one more verse,” and on he went. When he had finished, he said:
“I says these chapters and texts that our old clergyman taught me when I was a boy of ten, I says them to myself, People about here says they don’t believe these things, but I do: and I talks them over to myself, and comforts myself with ‘em, for I be over eighty.”
This little conversation by the wayside may well encourage Sunday school workers in teaching their classes to commit to memory passages of Scripture. For seventy years the glorious gospel in the fifty-third of Isaiah had remained in the mind of this man, and in his old age it was the voice of God to him, proclaiming to him salvation and peace through Christ crucified.
H. F. W.