A TOUCHING STORY | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 23, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 24.

A TOUCHING STORY.

ONCE I knew a workingman—a potter by trade—who had one small invalid child at home. He wrought at his trade with exemplary fidelity, being always in the shop with the opening of day.

He managed, however, to bear each evening to the bedside of the “wee lad,” as he called him, a flower, or a bit of ribbon, a fragment of crimson glass—indeed, anything that would lie out on the white counterpane and give a color in the room. He was a quiet, unsentimental Scotchman, but never went he home at nightfall without some toy or trinket, showing he had remembered the wan face that lit up so when he came in.

I presume he never said to a living soul that he loved that sick boy so much; still he went on patiently loving him. And by and by he moved that whole shop into positively real but unconscious fellowship with him. The workmen made curious little jars and teacups upon their wheels, and painted diminutive pictures down their sides before they stuck them in corners of the kiln at burning-time.

One brought some fruit in the bulge of his apron, and another some engravings in a rude scrap-book. Not one of them all whispered a word, for this solemn thing was not to be talked about.

They put them in the old man’s hat, where he found them; so he understood all about it. And I tell you seriously that entire pottery, full of men of rather coarse fiber by nature, grew quiet as the months drifted, becoming gentle and kind, and some of the ungoverned ones stopped swearing as the weary look on their patient fellow-worker’s face told them beyond any mistake that the inevitable shadow was drawing nearer.

Every day now somebody did a piece of his work for him and put it upon the sanded plank to dry; thus he could come later and go earlier.

So, when the bell tolled, and the little coffin came out of the door of the lowly house, right round the corner, out of sight, there stood a hundred stalwart workingmen from the pottery, with their clean clothes on, most of whom gave a half-day of time for the privilege of taking off their hats to the simple procession, filing in behind it, and following across the village green to its grave, that small burden of a child, which probably not one of them had ever seen with his own eyes.

—Selected.