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Page 73
"The--WHAT?" The Rev. Paul Ford's eyes left the leaf and gazed
wonderingly into Pollyanna's merry little face.
"Well, that's what father used to call 'em," she laughed. "Of
course the Bible didn't name 'em that. But it's all those that
begin 'Be glad in the Lord,' or 'Rejoice greatly,' or 'Shout for
joy,' and all that, you know--such a lot of 'em. Once, when
father felt specially bad, he counted 'em. There were eight
hundred of 'em."
"Eight hundred!"
"Yes--that told you to rejoice and be glad, you know; that's why
father named 'em the 'rejoicing texts.' "
"Oh!" There was an odd look on the minister's face. His eyes had
fallen to the words on the top paper in his hands--"But woe unto
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" "And so your
father--liked those 'rejoicing texts,' " he murmured.
"Oh, yes," nodded Pollyanna, emphatically. "He said he felt
better right away, that first day he thought to count 'em. He
said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be
glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it--SOME. And father felt
ashamed that he hadn't done it more. After that, they got to be
such a comfort to him, you know, when things went wrong; when the
Ladies' Aiders got to fight--I mean, when they DIDN'T AGREE about
something," corrected Pollyanna, hastily. "Why, it was those
texts, too, father said, that made HIM think of the game--he
began with ME on the crutches--but he said 'twas the rejoicing
texts that started him on it."
"And what game might that be?" asked the minister.
"About finding something in everything to be glad about, you
know. As I said, he began with me on the crutches." And once more
Pollyanna told her story--this time to a man who listened with
tender eyes and understanding ears.
A little later Pollyanna and the minister descended the hill,
hand in hand. Pollyanna's face was radiant. Pollyanna loved to
talk, and she had been talking now for some time: there seemed to
be so many, many things about the game, her father, and the old
home life that the minister wanted to know.
At the foot of the hill their ways parted, and Pollyanna down one
road, and the minister down another, walked on alone.
In the Rev. Paul Ford's study that evening the minister sat
thinking. Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of
paper--his sermon notes. Under the suspended pencil in his
fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank--his sermon to be. But
the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or
of what he intended to write. In his imagination he was far away
in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor,
sick, worried, and almost alone in the world--but who was poring
over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had
told him to "rejoice and be glad."
After a time, with a long sigh, the Rev. Paul Ford roused
himself, came back from the far Western town, and adjusted the
sheets of paper under his hand.
"Matthew twenty-third; 13--14 and 23," he wrote; then, with a
gesture of impatience, he dropped his pencil and pulled toward
him a magazine left on the desk by his wife a few minutes before.
Listlessly his tired eyes turned from paragraph to paragraph
until these words arrested them:
"A father one day said to his son, Tom, who, he knew, had refused
to fill his mother's woodbox that morning: 'Tom, I'm sure you'll
be glad to go and bring in some wood for your mother.' And
without a word Tom went. Why? Just because his father showed so
plainly that he expected him to do the right thing. Suppose he
had said: 'Tom, I overheard what you said to your mother this
morning, and I'm ashamed of you. Go at once and fill that
woodbox!' I'll warrant that woodbox, would be empty yet, so far
as Tom was concerned!"
On and on read the minister--a word here, a line there, a
paragraph somewhere else:
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