Ester Ried Yet Speaking | Page 2

wanted to know more about her. I wanted to get acquainted with you, so I might ask you things about her. I am waiting now for my husband to come and introduce us. But perhaps it isn't necessary. Do you know who I am?"
"It is Mrs. Roberts, I believe?" the young man said, struggling with his astonishment and embarrassment.
"Yes, and you are Mr. Alfred Ried. Well, now we know each other without any further ceremony. Will you tell me a little about your sister, Mr. Ried? You were thinking of her just now."
"I was missing her just now," said he, trying to smile, "as I very often am. I was a little fellow when she died; but the older I grow the more difficult I find it to see how the world can spare her. She was so full of plans for work, and there are so few like her."
"It may be that she is working still, in the person of her brother."
He shook his head energetically, though his face flushed.
"No, I can only blunder vaguely over work that I know she, with her energetic ways and quick wits, could have done, and done well. It happens that she was especially interested in a class of people of whom I know something. They need help, and I don't know how to help them. It seems to me that she could have done it."
"Will you tell me who the people are?"
"It is a set of boys for whom nobody cares," he said, speaking sadly; "it hardly seems possible that there could ever have been a time when anybody cared for them, though I suppose their mothers did when they were little fellows."
Thus spoke the ignorant young man,--ignorant of the depths to which sin will sink human nature, but rich in the memory of mother-love.
"I think of my sister Ester in connection with them," he said, speaking apologetically, "because she was peculiarly interested in wild young fellows like them; she thought they might be reached,--that there might be ways invented for reaching them, such as had not been yet. She had plans, and they were good ones. I thought so then, little fellow that I was, and I think so now, only nobody is at work carrying them out; and I wonder sometimes if Ester could have been needed in heaven half as much as she is needed on earth. She used to talk to me a great deal about what might be done. I think now that she wanted to put me in the way of taking up some of the work that she would have done; but she mistook her material. I can't do it."
"Are you sure? You are young yet, and besides, you may be doing more than you think. Couldn't I help? What is there that needs doing for these particular young men?"
"Everything!" he said, excitedly. "If you should see them you would get a faint idea of it. They come occasionally down to the Sabbath-school at the South End; in fact, they come quite frequently, though I'm sure I can't see why. It certainly isn't for any good that they get. Their actions, Mrs. Roberts, surpass anything that I ever imagined."
"Who is their teacher?"
"That would be a difficult question to answer. They have a different teacher every Sabbath. No one is willing to undertake the class twice. They have tried all the teachers who attend regularly, and several who have volunteered for once, and never would attempt it a second time. Just now, there is no one who will make a venture."
"Have you tried?"
He shook his head emphatically.
"I know at least so much. Why, Mrs. Roberts, some of them are as old as I, and, indeed, I think one or two are older. No; we have secured the best teachers that we could for them, but each one has been a failure. I suppose they must go."
"Go where?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"What an awful question! Where will they go, Mrs. Roberts, if we let them slip now?"
He was tremendously in earnest. One could not help feeling that he had studied the possibilities, and felt the danger.
"Suppose I try to help! Shall I come and take that class next Sabbath?"
This simple, directly-put question brought the young man suddenly from the heights of his excitement into visible embarrassment. He looked down on the small, fair lady, reaching hardly to his shoulder, attired in that unmistakable way which bespeaks the lady of wealth and culture, and could imagine nothing more incongruous than to have her seated before that class of swearing, spitting, fighting boys. Not that her wealth or her culture was an objection, but she looked so utterly unlike what he had imagined their teacher must be,--she was so small, so frail, so fair and sweet, and ignorant of the