'our Tom' Author:James Martin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. " He must be courteous toward the lowly, To the weak and sorrowful, loving too ; He must be courageous, refined, and holy, By nature exalted, and f... more »irm, and true. To such I might fearlessly give the keeping Of love, that would never outgrow its spring— There would be few tears of a woman's weeping If they loved such men as my king, my king!" Old Song. Master Alfred got into trouble with his tutor to-day, Miss Mabel ? I am very sorry, but I do not think you need run upstairs in such a hurry to tell it. It looks, you know, very much as if you were glad, instead of being sorry, that things had gone unpleasantly. You were not glad ? you are quite sure ? you are positive about it ? Well, please, don't be quite so positive. Old Martha will not believe any ill of either of her nurslings if she can help it; but whenever people grow very positive, it is rather apt to be a sign that they have just a littlebit of conscience which is not quite fast asleep. And so, because they have a little something inside them which whispers, " You are quite wrong; you know you are," they talk a little bigger and louder than usual. Do you know, that generally ends in nobody at all being convinced ? The little whisper within, can't be silenced by all the loud talking; and as for the outsiders—why, clear child, we old people have played that little game far too often ourselves, in our own day, not to quite understand it all. You both of you say that I have a text out of the Bible for everything; but I don't see how it could be " a lamp to our feet, and a light to our path," any way else. If a body was really in downright earnest want of a word to guide them, or an example to warn them, it would be a terrible thing to turn over the pages of the Bible, one after the other, and find nothing t...« less