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"'Don't you think you would love the boy a little even though he had a hump on his back and his features were thin and sharp and pale?' 'Mrs Arnot,' says I, in, 'if you say another word about the little chap I shall be struck all of a heap, fur my heart jist kinder-- kinder pains like a toothache to do somethin' for hiin, and says she, 'I think you are a very inconsistent man, Mr Growther You have been runnin' yourself down, and yet you claim to be better than your Maker He calls himself our Heavenly Father, and yet you are sure that you have a kinder and more fatherly heart than he You are one of his little, weak, deformed children, twisted all out of shape, as you have described, by his enemy and yours, and yet you the sareat deal more like a true father toward your child than he will toward his You virtually say that you would rescue your child and be pitiful and tender toward him, but that your Heavenly Father will leave you in the clutches of the cruel enemy, or exact conditions that you cannot co for you Haven't you read in the Bible that "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him"? You think very meanly of yourself, but you appear to thinkso?'

"The truth bust in on ht into this old kitchen e open the shutters of a sumerment, and had made such a blasted old fool of myself all these years, that I just looked around for a knot-hole to crawl into I didn't knohich way to look, but at last I looked at her, and reat thump when I sao tears a-standin' in her eyes Then she juives me that warm hand o' her'n and says: 'Mr Growther, whenever you wish to kno God feels toward you, think how you felt toward that little chap that was abused and beaten all out o' shape,' and she was gone Well, the upshot of it all is that I don't think a bit better of myself--not one bit--but that weakly little chap, with a peaked face and a hump on his back, that Mrs Arnot made so real-like that I see him a-lookin' at me out of the cheer there half the time--he's a makin' ot a hump on my back and humps all over; but I keep a-sayin' to myself, 'Like as a father pitieth his children,' and I don't feel near as much like cussin' as I used to That little chap that Mrs Arnot described is doin' ood, and if I could find some poor little critter just like him, with no one to look after him, I'd take him in and do for him in a minit"