bell notificationshomepageloginedit profileclubsdmBox

Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.

Words: 108870 in 51 pages

This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.

10% popularity   0 Reactions

THE BRENTONS

However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace.

"Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening devotions upon her knees and with her work-roughened hands clasped upon the gaudy patchwork quilt; "guide Thou my son. Bring him to feel that his perfect happiness can come only from going forth to preach Thy word to all men."

And, as it chanced, the door of her room had been left slightly open. Scott Brenton, young and alert and full of enthusiasms which his years of grinding work and economy had been powerless to down, came leaping up the steps just then. The front door had been left unlocked for him. He closed it noiselessly behind him, and then started to run up the stairs. The murmur of his mother's voice checked him, stayed his step a moment, and then changed its pace. He went on up the stairs quite soberly, thoughtful, his face a little overcast.

Next morning, while he dressed, he kept his teeth shut cornerwise, a habit he had when he was making up his mind to any noxious undertaking. Then he went downstairs, to find his mother smiling contentedly to herself, while she added the finishing touches to the breakfast. It was sausage, that morning, Scott Brenton always remembered afterwards. They had been chosen out of deference to his boyish appetite. He never tasted them again, if he could help it. They seemed to have added to their already strange assortment of flavours a tang of bitterness that bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.

His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition and self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small wonder that her pride in him could never be completely downed! Nevertheless,--

"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.

But she missed a certain young enthusiasm from his accent, as he answered,--

"Fine!"

"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose life has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms of speech.

"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"

She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of the fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.


Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg


Load Full (0)

Login to follow story

More posts by @FreeBooks

0 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

 

Back to top