Your Boys | Page 5

about our language, and I gave them specimens of it, and there I was on sure ground. It is a beautiful language, full of poetry and music. Then I talked about the way the gipsies get their living--and other people's; and for thirty minutes those Munsters hardly knew if they were on the chairs or on the floor--and I purposely made them laugh. They had just come out of the hell of the trenches. They had that haunted, weary, hungry look, and if only I could make them laugh and forget the hell out of which they had just climbed it was religion, and I wasn't wasting time.
When I had been talking for thirty minutes, I stopped, and said, "Boys, there's a lot more to this story. Would you like some more?"
"Yes," they shouted.
"Come back to-morrow," I said.
I was fishing in unlikely waters, and if you leave off when fish are hungry they will come back for more. For six nights I told those boys gipsy stories. I took them out into the woods. We went out amongst the rabbits. I told the boys the rabbits got very fond of me--so fond that they used to go home with me! I took them through the clover-fields on a June day and made them smell the perfume. I took them among the buttercups. I told them it was the Finger of Love and the Smile of Infinite Wisdom that put the spots upon the pansy and the deep blue in the violet. And then we went out among the birds and we saw God taking songs from the lips of a seraph and wrapping them round with feathers.
And the boys saw Jesus in every buttercup and every primrose, and every little daisy, and in every dewdrop, and heard something of the song of the angels in the notes of the nightingale and the skylark. Oh! Jesus was there, and they felt Him, and they saw Him. I took them amongst the gipsy tents, amongst the woodlands and dells of the old camping-grounds. They walked with Him and they talked with Him. I didn't use the usual Church language, but I used the language of God in Nature and the boys heard Him.
Towards the end of the week one of those Munster boys came and touched me and said, "Your Riverence! Your Riverence!" he says. "You're a gentleman."
I knew I had got that boy.
Now, if you are an old angler you know what happens if you begin to tug at the line the first time you get a bite. When you hook a fish, if he happens to be a Munster, you have got to keep your head and play him, let him have the line, let him go, keep steady, no excitement, give him play. I gave him a bit of line, that young Munster. I thanked him for his compliment and then walked away--with my eyes over my shoulder, for if he hadn't come after me I should have been after him.
Presently he pulled my tunic and said, "Won't you give me a minute, sir?"
"What's the trouble?" I said.
"Sir," he said, with a little catch in his voice that I can hear now, "you've got something I haven't."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"It's like the singing of a little song, and it gets into my heart. I want it. Won't you tell me how to get it? I want it."
"Sonny," I said, "it's for you. You can have it at the same price I paid for it."
"Begorra," says he, "you will tell me to give up my religion, you will!"
I said, "If God has put anything in your life that helps you to be a better and a nobler and a braver man, He doesn't want you to give it up."
"He doesn't?" he asked. "What am I to give up, then?"
And I replied, "Your sin."
The boy said again, "You're a gentleman."
If I had said one word about his religion or his creed, my line would have snapped and I would have lost my fish.
That night, when all the boys had gone, we got into a corner and we knelt down, and when he went he said, "I've got it, sir. I've got the little song--_and it's singing_."
* * * * *
At one of my meetings the boys were four thousand strong and the Commandant of the camp was to preside. As they say in the Army, he had got the wind up. He did not know me. When he saw the crowd there he began to wonder what was going to happen. He called one of the officers to him, and said,
"I don't know what he's going to do. I hope he's not going to give us a revival meeting or something of that sort. I hope he knows that