you had to do
because it said to, whether you liked it or not, that was the one you
struck oftenest in life and it took the hardest pull to obey. It was
just the hatefulest text of any, and made you squirm most. There was
no possible way to get around it. It meant, that if you liked a
splinter new slate, and a sharp pencil all covered with gold paper, to
make pictures and write your lessons, when Clarissa Polk sat next you
and sang so low the teacher couldn't hear until she put herself to
sleep on it, "I WISHT I had a slate! I wisht I HAD a slate! I wisht I
had a SLATE! Oh I WISHT I HAD A SLATE!"--it meant that you just had to
wash up yours and stop making pictures yourself, and pass it over; you
even had to smile when you offered it, if you did it right. I seldom
got through it as the Lord would, for any one who loaned Clarissa a
slate knew that it would come back with greasy, sweaty finger marks on
it you almost had to dig a hole to wash off, and your pencil would be
wet. And if there were the least flaw of crystal in the pencil, she
found it, and bore down so hard that what she wrote never would come
off.

The Lord always seemed bigger and more majestic to me, than at any
other time, when I remembered that He could have known all that, and
yet smiled as He loaned Clarissa His slate. And that old Bible thing
meant, too, that if you would like it if you were travelling a long
way, say to California to hunt gold, or even just to Indiana, to find a
farm fit to live on--it meant that if you were tired, hungry, and sore,
and would want to be taken in and fed and rested, you had to let in
other people when they reached your house. Father and mother had been
through it themselves, and they must have been tired as could be,
before they reached Sarah Hood's and she took them in, and rested and
fed them, even when they were only a short way from the top of the
Little Hill, where next morning they looked down and stopped the wagon,
until they chose the place to build their house. Sarah Hood came
along, and helped mother all day, so by night she was settled in the
old cabin that was on the land, and ready to go to work making money to
build a new one, and then a big house, and fix the farm all beautiful
like it was then. They knew so well how it felt, that they kept one
bed in the boys' room, and any man who came at dusk got his supper, to
sleep there, and his breakfast, and there never was anything to pay.
The girl