it, but Aunt Mary was in earnest.
Don't you know about it, Davie?"

"About these people fighting, do you mean? Well, I once heard papa say
that Mr Strong's life was for many years a constant fight. And he
said, too, that he was using the right weapons, and that he would
doubtless win the victory. So you see there is one of them a soldier,"
said David.

"It must be a different kind of warfare from your father's," said Frank.
"I wonder what Mr Strong fights for?"

"But I think he is fighting the very same battle, only in a different
way."

"Well," said Frank, "what about it?"

"Oh! I don't know that I can tell much about it. It used to be a very
bad neighbourhood where old Strong lives, and the neighbours used to
bother him awfully. And that wasn't the worst. He has a very bad
temper naturally, and he got into trouble all round when he first lived
there. And one day he heard some of them laughing at him and his
religion, saying there was no difference between Christians and other
people. And they didn't stop there, but scoffed at the name of our
Lord, and at the Bible. It all happened down at Hunt's Mills, and they
didn't know that Mr Strong was there; and when he rose up from the
corner where he had been sitting all the time, and came forward among
them, they were astonished, and thought they were going to have great
fun. But they didn't that time. Mr Hunt told papa all about it. He
just looked at them and said: `God forgive you for speaking lightly that
blessed name, and God forgive me for giving you the occasion.' And then
he just turned and walked away.

"After that it didn't matter what they said or did to him, he wouldn't
take his own part. They say that for more than a year he didn't speak a
word to a man in the neighbourhood where he lives; he couldn't trust
himself. But he got a chance to do a good turn once in a while, that
told better than words. Once he turned some stray cattle out of John
Jarvis's grain, and built up the fences when there was no one at
Jarvis's house to do it. That wouldn't have been much--any good
neighbour would have done as much as that, you know. But it had
happened the day before that the Jarvis's boys had left down the bars of
his back pasture, and all his young cattle had passed most of the night
in his own wheat. It was not a place that the boys needed to go to, and
it looked very much as if they had done it on purpose. They must have
felt mean when they c