"Well, Peter Cartwright, if your
mother could know--"
But the young backwoodsman, whose fame was already filling the
wilderness, and was to fill the whole Christian world, now pressed on
riding fast, and was soon beyond her kind scolding.
"Well, 'pon my word! Did anybody ever see the like of that!" she cried,
seeing that Ruth had followed her to the door. "That boy don't know half
the time whether he has had anything to eat or not. And it's just
exactly the same to him when he's got money and when he hasn't."
The girl did not hear what Miss Penelope said. Her heart was responding,
as it always did, to everything great or heroic, and she looked after
this boy preacher with newly opened eyes. She suddenly saw as by a flash
of white light, that he and the other pioneer men of God--these
soldiers of the cross who were bearing it through the trackless
wilderness--were of the greatest. Her dim eyes followed the young
man--this brave bearer of the awful burden of the divine
mission--watching him press on to the river. She thought of the many
rivers that he must swim, the forests that he must thread, the savages
that he must contend against, the wild beasts that he must conquer, the
plague that he must defy, the shelterless nights that he must sleep
under the trees--freezing, starving, struggling through winter's cold
and summer's heat, and all for the love of God and the good of mankind.
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