How John Became a Man | Page 9

taken a different course. The giant roared with laughter at the insignificant stature and wonderful boastings of the pigmies. He ridiculed their threats when they told what they expected to do to him; but when he fell asleep that night, he was at their mercy. And he did not know until he awoke in the morning that while he was asleep these tiny people of whom he had made sport had bound him with innumerable threads and that he was their helpless captive. But John knew nothing of these stories or of other things that teach the lessons he so much needed; and perhaps his father did not know, so that he could tell his son what he should have been told.
The use of tobacco is an evil. When God made tobacco and pronounced it good, He did not mean for it to go into the mouth of any man or woman, much less into the mouths of children. Tobacco is a deadly poison; and the constant use of any poison must injure the body of the one who uses it. When it has sapped the strength from both the mind and the body, it leaves the individual weakened in every way and makes it harder for him to live a good, pure life.
No person who uses tobacco may be said to be perfectly well. Such a person may not realize how his health is impaired, because the stupor that the poison produces numbs his sensibilities; but the very appetite he has for tobacco is in itself a disease. In order for an habitual user to realize the harm that tobacco is doing to his health, he has simply to stop its use for a short time and watch the effect on his system.
Tobacco is not a food that God intended man to eat. In man's case it feeds only a craving that it has itself created. But the leaves of the tobacco plant do serve as food for the large, green worms that live and thrive in tobacco fields. Yes; tobacco is "very good" for the "creeping things" for which it was created; but it was not intended as food for man.
Could John and his cousins have understood all this when the next tobacco famine came to them, it seems that each would surely have resisted the temptation to stoop down, pick up a partly chewed quid of tobacco, cram it greedily into his watering mouth, and chew it as though it was the sweetest morsel he had ever tasted. But the boys did not know. They thought such things were manly.
CHAPTER IV
Early School Days
By the time John was eight years old, the evil influences with which he had been surrounded in his uncle's home were rapidly telling on him. To be sure, there was still the same pathetic expression in his deep, brown eyes, and now and then there could be observed in them a mischievous glance or a merry twinkle; but his general appearance was that of a sadly neglected child. Still the busy aunt took little notice either of him or of her own boys.
In his heart John was longing for someone to take an interest in him and to love him--someone to whom he could go with his boyish heartaches and from whom he could gain the sympathy for which his heart was craving. To be sure, his father was still kind, and sometimes John would imagine that he could even feel his father's love. At such times the boy would press closer to his parent, hoping that he would at least with his arm caress him; but his father did not understand. He could see only the outward roughness; and he said in his heart:
"It is all because he has never had a chance. He has grown up here on the prairie like a wild thing. He has never been to school, and I must send him at once."
With this purpose in his heart John's father decided to return with his child to the place that had once been his happy home. In making the change there were, of course, many things to take into consideration. But under the circumstances, to go seemed the best and proper thing to do. The sad events, he reasoned, were all in a lifetime; and he must make the best of them. The home would for a time seem desolate, he knew, but he thought that perhaps they could become used to it; anyway, his boy must be in school. The school terms would not be long (for only three or four months of each year were set apart for school purposes); but even these short terms would be better than none.
To John the change meant more. The five years that he had spent in the home of