THREE PAIRS OF SHOES

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 5, 1892

THREE PAIRS OF SHOES.

THERE they are in a neat little row under the mantel in the children's bedroom, a pair of twelves, a pair of nines, and a tiny pair of fives belonging to baby.

They are all more or less wrinkled and worn, and the pair of twelves have holes in the toes which caused me to say a little while ago to the sturdy wearer of them that there was no sense in his kicking out shoes like that, and if he were not more careful he would just have to go barefooted. He heard me with the utmost indifference, as I know from the fact that the threat was hardly out of my mouth when he asked me if I knew whose little boy he would have been if I had never been born.

“You might have been the little boy of some papa who couldn't have bought you any shoes at all,” I said reproachfully.

“Oh, well,” he said calmly, in the fullness and beauty of his childish faith, “God has millions and trillions of shoes, and I could just ask him for a pair whenever I wanted them! Don't you see, papa?”

Three pairs of shoes! Three pairs of tender little feet upon the untried border of life's mysterious land!

I sit and look at the little shoes, wondering where the feet that wear them will be led in time to come, the little feet that

“Through long years Must wander on 'mid hopes and fears.”

How much I would give to know the future, that I might stand between them and the temptations so sure to assail them, that I might guide their feet aright, that I might shield them from pain and sorrow if I could!

There is something strangely appealing and half pathetic to every loving father and mother in the sight of a row of little shoes like those before me now. They arouse the tenderest instincts of one's nature. I don't know why.

The wearers of the little shoes may have been very fretful, or mischievous, or trying all day. You may have been “all out of patience” with them. You may have whipped the little hands, or put the rebellious little ones to bed, declaring that they were “worrying the life out of you;” but they are not “worrying” you any now, and you go about picking up a little stocking here and a little skirt there, with nothing but tenderness in your heart toward them.

You think only of how precious the wearers of the little clothes are, and there is no melody on earth one-half so sweet to you as the music of the baby voices when they knelt around you a little while ago, saying, “God bless mamma and papa, and keep us all safely

through the night.” You will hear no sweeter music than that this side of Paradise.

You reproach yourself for your lack of tenderness and patience as you look at that little row of shoes, and sometimes you fall to thinking of the unutterable sorrow that would fill your heart to breaking if the wearer of any one pair of the little shoes would wear them no more—if you should awaken some morning, as heart-broken fathers and mothers have sometimes awakened, and find that the wearer of one pair of the little shoes had gone from you in the night to wear the garments that wax not old.

Three pairs of little shoes! There are tears in your eyes as you look at them now; and perhaps you steal softly to the bedside of the little sleepers to make sure that they are sleeping sweetly and safely, and to touch their little hands or their cool, moist brows with your lips, your heart filled with tender memories, with hopes and fears, with unspoken prayers.

Three pairs of little shoes! Three little pilgrims setting out on the voyage of life, their frail barks as yet untouched and unharmed by adverse winds and waves. God bring them all to port.—Selected.