HOW ROSIE HELPED.

HER name was Rosalie; but she was such a little creature that it seemed more natural to call her Rosie.

Besides, she was always among the roses. On this morning while her father talked with Dick, she hovered between the study and the flower garden, now gathering her flowers, now peeping her head into the study to see if papa was not almost through and ready to talk to her. She was shy of Dick; he was a new boy, had only been with them a few days, and papa more than suspected was not a good boy; so Rosie had strict orders not to visit him in the stable, or have any talk with him unless papa or some one else was within hearing. Only this morning papa had heard Dick use language which made him feel afraid that he ought not to keep him in his employ. Yet how sorry he was for poor orphan Dick, that nobody seemed to care for!

He tried to make him feel that he was his friend; tried to rouse him to want to be a man, and to overcome his grave faults. "You are just the age of my boy Harris," Rosie heard her father say, "and he is just about your size. Harris is a grand boy; he never gave his mother an hour of anxiety, and I can trust him anywhere. I have such faith in his word that when he says a thing, I do not have to inquire into it, I know it is true. Isn't it worth while for a boy to have such a character as that? Don't you think you would enjoy hearing people say: That thing is so, you may depend on it, for Dick Sanders told me, and he is to be trusted, you know.'"

Dick shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and his face seemed to be growing red over some feeling, Rosie's papa was not sure what.

At last he said, "It is all very well for a boy like yours to be honest, and all that; why shouldn't he be? Look what chances he has had; and then look what chances I've had! Kicked and cuffed about the world all my life; nobody cares what becomes of me. I heard you pray for Harris this morning, and I thought of it then. There never was a person in this world who cared enough for me to make a prayer about me!"

Little Rosebud

What a strange boy Dick was! For a moment, Rosie's father did not know what to say. Just then Rosie, her head framed in the window, where she had been standing for a few minutes, her hands full of flowers, her face sweetly grave, spoke her troubled thought: "Didn't Jesus pray for you when he lived here? That time when he said 'Now I pray for all who shall believe on me?'"

Dick started so suddenly as to nearly overturn the little table on which he leaned, turned to the window, and looking steadily at Rosie, said hoarsely: "What do you mean?"

"Why, that time, don't you know? When he prayed for his disciples; then he said, 'neither pray I for these alone,' and after that he prayed for everybody who should ever live, who would love him and mind him. If you mean to mind him, he prayed for you, too, mamma told me. Don't you mean to mind him? Because it isn't nice to leave yourself out of his prayer."

Wise little Rosie! Papa said not another word. He thought Dick had gotten his sermon, text and all. Neither did Rosie say any more; she did not know she had preached a sermon.

She went away, humming—

Years and years after that, when Rosie was nineteen, one day she went to church in a city five hundred miles away from her childhood home, and she heard a man preach on these words: "Neither pray I for these alone, but for all them which shall believe on me through their words." It was a grand sermon; Rosalie Pierson thought she had never heard one more wonderful. At the close of service the minister came straight to her seat, held out his hand and said: "It was a blessed text, Miss Pierson; I never forgot the sermon you preached from it. I know now that the Lord Jesus prayed for me, that day. And I know that I believe on Him through your words."

"Why!" said Rosalie, in astonishment, "I don't understand, this surely cannot be—"

"Yes," said the minister, "I am Dick."