Give Joy to a Child by Douglas Jerrold

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 16, 1879

Give Joy to a Child.

By Douglas Jerrold

BLESSED be the hand that prepares a pleasure for a child, for there is no saying when and where it may again bloom forth. Does not almost everybody remember some kind-hearted man who showed him a kindness in the dulcet days of his childhood? The writer of this recollects himself, at this moment, as a barefooted lad, standing at the wooden fence of a poor little garden in his native village, while with longing eyes he gazed on the flowers which were blooming there quietly in the brightness of a Sabbath morning. The possessor came forth from his little cottage; he was a wood-cutter by trade, and spent the whole week at work in the woods. He had come into the garden to gather flowers to put in his coat when he went to church. He saw the boy, and breaking off the most beautiful of his carnations—it was streaked with red and white—he gave it to him. Neither the giver nor the receiver spoke a word, and with bounding steps the boy ran home. And now here, at a vast distance from that home, after so many events of so many years, the feelings of gratitude which agitated the breast of that boy expresses itself on paper. The carnation has long since withered, but it now blooms afresh.

—Douglas Jerrold.