A Little Child Shall Lead Them

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 21, 1909

A Little Child Shall Lead Them

“DADDY! daddy! And you said you wouldn’t.” There was a world of disappointment in the tiny tot’s voice that sounded strangely out of harmony with the surroundings in the kitchen of the old-fashioned country inn where Jack Mitchel and two companions sat drinking their half-pints. “Us’ll cry again,” she continued, and then, putting her finger into her mouth, stood strangely silent.

Dot, the apple of Jack’s eye, from her home on the opposite side of the road, had caught sight of her father entering the saloon. Before her mother could stop her, away she toddled as fast as her legs could carry her, gleefully calling out, “Daddy! daddy! Dot’s coming,” for she loved daddy, and she knew daddy loved her.

But when she entered and saw him with a mug of liquor raised to his mouth, her voice lost its sweetness; she looked, stopped, and then uttered her childish reproach.

It didn’t mean much to the others, but to Jack it meant a lot. As if stricken nerveless, the mug fell from his grasp, and, ashamed of himself, he hid his face.

Jack was a good man, hard working, full of affection and devotion to his wife and child. Yet the enemy had been gaining the mastery over him. Only the other day, he had gone home under the influence of liquor, his nature for the first time being quite changed.

Snappy and churlish, he had reproached his wife, and when little Dot sought to clamber onto his knee, he had pushed her away.

“Daddy won’t love me!” cried the child, and tears trickled down her cheeks, to keep company with those that welled from her mother’s eyes.

A sensible woman, she said nothing then, but when he was sober, she had pleaded with him, “Jack, do give it up!” and he had promised he would, and his little daughter coming in just at the moment, he had picked her up in his arms and said, “Daddy won’t have any more of the horrid stuff!”

And now his promise was broken.

But it was the last time. What preaching could not have done, that childish reproach had done. “The young teetotaler,” as Jack Brown called her, fixed his resolve. Pulling himself together, he paid his money, gathered his heart’s treasure into his arms, then turning to his mates, said: “Chaps, no more for me! I’ve taken my last. The little ’un’s made a man of me. She sha’n’t reproach me again.” He went out of the house, and the saloonkeeper never welcomed him as a customer again.

“A little child shall lead them.”

A little child led him, just when he needed to be led.—The Water Lily.