And they said, "Farewell forever!" And the forests, dark and lonely, Moved through all their depths of darkness, And the waves upon the margin Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, To the regions of the home-wind, To the Land of the Hereafter! -HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Adapted. Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Matthew xxviii. 19–20. S THE STORY OF THE SOWER ONCE upon a time, our Lord said, a man went out to sow his field. The man had a large bag of grain by his side, and as he walked he kept putting his hand into the bag, and taking out the grain and scattering it over the ground. In the middle of the field there was a path, a hard path, trodden day after day by the fcet of men and horses. Somebody was walking over it, or driving over it, all the time. Some of the seed fell on this beaten path. There was a place on one side where the field lay at the foot of a hill, and the hill was made of rock, and over the rock the soil was very thin; only a few inches of earth, and then the rock beneath. In a corner of the field there had been a great many briers and thistles the year before, and they were just getting ready to start up again and make a bramble patch. The rest of the field was plowed land, ready for seed. So the man with the bag went back and forth across the field, scattering the grain. And some fell on the hard path, and some on the thin ground, and some among the brambles, and some on the good plowed land. And pretty soon a man came walking along, wearing heavy boots, and, as he went along the path, he stepped on some of the seeds which lay there and broke them into little pieces. So they never grew. And by and by a bird came along that way and caught sight of the grain, and he was glad, for there was nothing that he liked better than grain. But, as he was a generous little bird, he took only a nibble or two and then flew away to tell all the other little birds in that neighborhood that there was a fine dinner ready for them on the path, and wouldn't they like to come and eat it? So a whole flock of little birds came flying as fast as their wings could carry them, and lighted down among the grains of wheat, and in a very short time nothing was left there but the path. And so nothing ever grew out of that grain. But the seeds in the shallow soil began to grow at once. When the sun came out, there was so little earth that it was warmed through very quickly and as there is nothing which seeds like better than to be comfortably warm, the grain grew very fast. Little leaves poked up their tiny green heads through the ground, and there they breathed the air and drank the rain, and every morning they were taller than they were the night before. But while seeds like to be warm, they object very much to being scorched. Unhappily, after these seeds had got their good start, and the stalks of wheat were beginning to say to themselves that they were much taller than any other wheat in the field, for the other wheat did not grow nearly so fast, there came a very hot day. The sun blazed and blazed until the tall wheat felt as if it were living next door to a big bonfire. get away from the hot sun, but there was the hard rock. The little roots tried to down in the cool earth; They could not find a |