What a Little Boy can do
“I wish, I wish, I wish,” said a little boy, who woke early one morning, and lay on the bed thinking. “I wish I was grown up, so as to do some good. If I was Governor, I would make some good laws; or I would be a missionary; or I would get rich, and give away so much to poor people; but I am only a little boy, and it will take me plenty of years to grow up.”—And so, was he going to pat off doing good will then? “Well,” he said to himself while he was dressing, “I know what I can do. I can be good; that is left to little boys,” Therefore, when he was dressed, he knelt and asked God to help him to be good, and try to serve Him all day with all his heart, and not forget. Then he went downstairs to finish his sums.
No sooner was he seated with his clean slate before him, than his mother called him to run into the wood-house and find his little brother. He did not want to leave his lesson, yet he cheerfully said, “I’ll go, mother;” and away he ran. And how do you think he found his brother. –With a sharp ax in his hand. “ I chop,” he said; and quite likely the next moment he would have chopped off his little toes. The little boy only thought of minding his mother; but who can tell if his ready obedience did not save his baby brother from being cripple for life?
As he was going on an errand for his mother, he saw a poor woman, whose foot had slipped on the newly made ice, and she fell; and falling she had spilled her bag of beans, and basket of apples, and some little boys were snatching up her apples and running of with them. The little boy stopped and said. “Let me help you to pick up your beans and apples;” and his nimble fingers quickly helped her out of her mishap. He only thought of being kind; he did not know how his kind act comforted the poor woman long after she got home, and how she prayed to God to bless him.
At dinner, his father and mother were talking. His father said roughly, “I shall not do anything for that man’s son; the old man always did his best to injure me.” “But father,” said the boy, looking into his father’s face, “does not the Bible say we must return good for evil?” The boy did not know that his father thought of what his son had said all the afternoon, and said within himself, “My boy is more of a Christian than I am; I must be a better man.”
When he came home form school at night, he went to the cage, and found his dear canary bird dead. “Oh, mother! And I tended birdie so sweetly;” and the little boy burst into tears over his poor favorite, “Who gave the birdie’s life and who took it again?” asked his mother stroking his head. “God,” he answered through his tears, “and He knows best;” and he tried so hush himself.
A lady sat in a dark corner of the room. She had lost two children; and though she hope they had gone to heavenly land, she would rather have had her little sons back again. But when she beheld the little boy’s patience and submission to his Father in heaven, she said, “I too will trust Him, like this little child.” Her heart was touched, and she went home with a little spring of healing gushing up there, and she became henceforth a better mother to the children yet left her.
When the little boy laid his head on his hands that night he thought, “I am too young to do any good; but oh, I do want to do good and to love the Savior, who came from heaven to die for me. I do …”
The heavenly Father’s children are sometimes called child of light; and does it not seem as if beams of light shone from this little child, warming, blessing everybody that came in his way? Who will say he did not do good?
Title: What a Little Boy can do
Author: Unknown
Location: Unknown
Year: Unknown
Media: Newspaper article, glued to Page 2 of the Ledger of Captain W. B.
Blair
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