THE SEA CAPTAIN.
ABOUT fifty years ago a party were traveling in a stagecoach from one town to another in Scotland. A lady saw from the coach window a little barefoot boy walking along the highway. He looked so tired that she pitied him, and asked the driver to give him a seat in the coach, saying that she would pay for it at the end of the journey.
The lady asked where he was going.
"To the sea-coast," he replied. "I want to find a captain who will let me go to sea with him as a cabin boy."
The lady talked kindly with him, and gave him some good, motherly advice. When she said "Good-by," she slipped half a crown into his hand.
He went to sea, and that is the last we hear of him for' twenty years.
A stagecoach was going over the same road twenty years later, when a tall sea captain looked from the coach window and saw an old lady walking. He stopped the coach and asked her to get in, telling the driver that he would pay for the seat. •
"I always feel like being kind to tired travelers," he said. "Twenty years ago I was walking over this same road, a poor barefoot lad, when a lady stopped the coach and took me in."
The lady looked at him a moment, and then exclaimed, much astonished, "Why, I am that very lady! I was rich then; now I am poor and alone."
"Dear madam," exclaimed the captain, "how glad I am to see you! I want to thank you for your kind words that day. I can never really repay you for the good you did me. But always after this you shall receive fifty pounds a year from my estate."
This touching story shows how God remembers the kindness that we show to others. He often lets it come back to us just when we need it the most.
S. S. Visitor.