AKE IT AWAY!"

Tode rang the bell at Mr. Hastings', and waited in some anxiety as to
whether he should get a glimpse of Miss Dora. He had some momentous
questions to ask her. Fortune, or, in other words, Providence, favored
him. While he waited for orders, Dora danced down the hall with a
message.

"Tode, papa says you are to come in the dining-room and wait; he wants
to send a note by you."

"All right," said Tode, following her into the brightly lighted room,
and plunging at once into his subject.

"Look here, what did you mean the other night about hearts, and things?"

"About what?"

"Why, don't you know? Down there to the meeting."

"Oh! Why I meant _that_; just what I said. That's the way they always
talk at a prayer-meeting about Jesus, and loving him, and all that."

"Was that a prayer-meeting where we was t'other night?"

"Why yes, of course. Tode, have you got the letters and figures all
made?"

"Do you go every time?"

"What, to prayer-meeting? What a funny idea. No, of course not. It
stormed, you know, and we had to go in somewhere. Wasn't it an awful
night?"

"Who is Jesus, anyhow?"

"Why, he is God. Tode, how queer you act. Why don't you ask Mr. Birge,
or somebody, if you want to know such things. Mamma says he is awful."

"Awful!"

"Yes, awful good, you know. He's the minister down there at that chapel.
Wasn't it a funny looking church? Ours don't look a bit like that. Tode,
where do you go to church?"

"My!" said Tode, with his old merry chuckle. "That's a queer one. _I_
don't go to church nowhere; never did."

"You ought to," answered Miss Dora, with a sudden assumption of dignity.
"It isn't nice not to go to church and to Sunday-school. _I_ go. Pliny
doesn't, because he has the headache so much. Shall I show you my
card?"

And she produced from her pocket a dainty bit of pasteboard, and held it
up.

"There, that's our verse. The whole school learn it for next Sunday.
Then we shall have a speech about it."

A sudden shiver ran through Tode's frame as he read the words printed on
that card:

"The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the
good."

He knew very little about that All-seeing Eye, but it came upon him like
a great shock, the picture of the eye of God reaching everywhere,
beholding the _evil_. He felt afraid, and alone, and desolate. He did
not know what was the matter with him, he had felt so strangely troubled
and unhappy since that even