That Little Toad | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 14, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 31.

That Little Toad.

MR. BROOKS is a stalwart farmer, with broad acres, rich and clean, a kind, frugal wife, a pleasant home, and two bright, happy, industrious children.

With a dear little friend of mine, some seven years old, I went out to "the farm" and passed a week.

One evening Mr. Brooks took Georgie on his knee and said:—

"I hope you are a temperance boy. Are you?"

"I am a Band of Hope boy, sir."

"I am very glad. If they had had Bands of Hope when I was a shaver it would have saved me the last fifty years of more or less trouble with that foot."

And he pointed to his right foot, on which was an embroidered slipper.

"That handsome slipper does not look as if it covers a boy's sin and shame, does it?"

Georgie's eyes grew very large and questioning as they looked first at the foot and then in the face of the good man.

"Oo-o, sir! Please tell me all about it."

"Yes, my little fellow, I will. When I was about your age—let me see—you are—how old?"

"Seven years old, sir."

"Well, I was but six years old. My father was a farmer and made a great deal of cider, and when it was new and sweet he let me drink as much as I wanted to. But after it began to work I wasn't allowed to drink any. But every fall he bottled up a supply for summer. One sunny autumn day I thought I would make some mud-pies, and went into the kitchen for a big iron spoon. They were putting some raisins into bottles in which cider was to be put and corked tight, so that when they were ready to drink the cider it would sparkle like champagne."

"My papa has champagne-cider, and one day some popped right into my face, and made me jump."

"I hope none will ever pop into your mouth. Well, my mamma filled my little hand with raisins and let me take a swallow of cider, and it tasted so good. I begged for more, and mamma said I might have one more swallow. And I took a big swallow and ran out to play. But though the sun was shining bright, and the mud was soft and warm, just right for pies, those raisins and that delicious cider kept tempting me back to the kitchen to ask for just a few little raisins and just one more sip before it should be all bottled up. But no one was in the kitchen at the moment, and I knew my kind mother wouldn't refuse me, so I took just one raisin and one little sip, and how many ones I took I don't know. But mother came in and told me to go out and play. I ran back to my pies and in a minute I saw a toad stick up its black head right where I was playing. I tried to scare it off, but it would come right back and keep squirming. I could not stand that intrusion in my bakery and I caught up my hatchet and brought it down with a vim, and then I screamed."

"Did the toad jump right up and bite your foot?"

"No, my boy, worse than that. It was no harmless little toad, but the serpent in the cider that bit my foot. I had drank so much that I did not know my own muddy toe from a toad, and it was not a toad's head but my own foot that took the blow. And when the doctor came, my great toe had to be cut entirely off."

"Oh, didn't it hurt awfully?"

"Yes, and it hurts me yet whenever I am tired. But that lost toe has been a life lesson, perhaps a life blessing to me. I might have kept on, sip by sip, and drank up my character, my farm, my home, my happiness, the happiness of all who loved me, my own life, and, more than all these, Heaven itself."

George's intent face looked very solemn a moment, then broke into the brightest of smiles, and he exclaimed:—

"Pretty high price to pay for cider!"

"Yes, yes!" said Mr. Brooks; "but many a man has paid it. It is the first step."—Temperance Banner.