s shoulders.

He screamed with pain.

The mother looked into his face with a sudden start.

"Why, what on earth, child? What have you been doing to-day?"

He hesitated and tried to be brave, but it was no use. He felt that he
would drop dead the next moment unless relief came. He buried his face
in her lap and sobbed his bitter confession.

"Do you think I'm going to die?" he asked.

She smiled:

"No, my Boy, you're only sunburned. How long were you naked in the sun?"

"From 'bout ten o'clock till nearly sundown----"

He moved again and screamed with agony.

The mother tenderly undressed the little, red, swollen body. The rough
clothes had stuck to the blistered skin in one place and the pain was so
frightful he nearly fainted before they were finally removed.

For two days and nights she never left his side, holding his hand to
give him courage when he was compelled to move. Almost his entire body,
inch by inch, was blistered. She covered it with cream and allowed only
two greased linen cloths to touch him.

On the second day as he lay panting for breath and holding her hand with
feverish grasp he looked into her pensive grey eyes through his own
bleared and bloodshot with pain and said softly:

"I'm sorry, Ma."

She pressed his hand:

"It's all right, my Boy; your mother loves you."

"I'm not sorry for the pain," he gasped. "What hurts me worse is that
you're so sweet to me!"

The dark face bent and kissed his trembling lips:

"It's all for the best. You couldn't have understood the preacher Sunday
when he took the text: 'The stars in their courses fought against
Sisera.' You learned it for yourself the only way we really learn
anything. God's in the wind and rain, the sun, the storm. All nature
works with him. You can easily fool your mother. It's not what you seem
to others; it's what you are that counts. God sees and knows. You see
and know in your little heart. I want you to be a great man--only a good
man can ever be great."

And so for an hour she poured into his heart her faith in God and His
glory until He became the one power fixed forever in the child's
imagination.

VII

The Boy lost his skin but grew another and incidentally absorbed some
ideas he never forgot.

On the day he was able to put on his clothes, it poured down rain and
work in the fields was impossible. A sense of delicious joy filled him.
He worked because he had to, not because he liked it. He was too proud
to