“How can we follow somebody we can’t see?”

Roy knitted his brows.  Rob’s questions were hard to answer sometimes, and then a smile flashed across his face.

“I’ll tell you.  It’s like this.  On my birthday granny called me in to give me a birthday talk and, of course, she talked to me about my property.  She said my uncle had managed it awfully well over there, and she hoped I would walk in his steps.  That would be following him though he was dead, wouldn’t it?”

“Ye-es,” was the slow response.

“And so you see,” Roy replied, leaning forward impressively, and his eyes glistening with earnestness, “we can each follow Jesus.  Try and live as He did, and do and speak like Him.  We read how He lived in the New Testament.”

“And He was the one that died for us,” Rob said, reflectively.

“Yes, He is the one you go to, to get your sins washed away.  That comes first before we begin to serve Him.”

“But I never could serve Him proper, always,” objected Rob.

“No, nor more can any one.  I’m awful, you know!  Dudley says I think such a lot of myself.  And of course Jesus never did.  And I grumble and cry over my leg every day, and of course He wouldn’t have done it.  But Jesus forgives us again and again, and helps us to be good, and that’s why we love Him, and because He died for us.”

“Would He forgive me, and help me?” asked Rob; “are you quite sure He would care to have me for a servant?”

“Of course I’m sure.  He wants everybody.  You just ask Him.”

Rob said no more.  He was a lad of few words, and for some days did not touch on the subject again.  His reading was progressing rapidly, and when Roy and Dudley found out that his birthday was near they laid their heads together and presented him with a handsome Bible, as they knew he was saving up his pennies to buy one.

His gratitude and delight overwhelmed them, and every day now, when his work was finished, he would sit down and spell out chapters of the gospels to himself.

As the days began to shorten, Roy grew so much stronger that he was able to be carried downstairs, and the first evening he was in the drawing-room, he asked Miss Bertram for the song of the two little drummer boys.

She sat down at the piano, and Dudley seeing Rob weeding a flower bed outside the open window, beckoned to him to come up closer and listen.

“It’s the best song out,” he shouted.

Roy’s face shone as Miss Bertram’s sweet voice rang out triumphantly.

   —­“’the fight was won, and the regiment saved
   By those two little dots in red!’”

“Oh, how I wish I could be a soldier!” was the muttered exclamation of Roy, “I shall never be able to serve the Queen now!”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Bertram, briskly; “granny would tell you ’that all the Bertrams have always served the Queen, and only a few of them have been soldiers!’”