RED-HEADED ANDY.
What should you do were your mother to fall down in a fit? stand still and scream? or run out of the house, and leave her lying half-dead upon the floor? Or, should you have what people call, “presence of mind?” that is, call for somebody to help her, and do all you could for her till they came. It is a great thing to have “presence of mind;” there are very few grown people who have it; there are plenty of people when a bad accident happens, who will crowd round the sick person, keep all the good fresh air away from him; wring their hands, say oh! and ah! and shocking! and dreadful! but there are few who think to run quickly for the doctor, or bring a glass of water, or do any one of the thousand little things which would help so much to make the poor sufferer better. If grown people do not think of these things, we certainly should not be disappointed if children do not; and yet, wonderful, though it may be, they are often quicker-witted at sucha time than their elders. I will tell you a story, to show you that it is so.
Andy Moore, was a short, stunted, freckled, little country boy; tough as a pine knot, and with about as much polish. Sometimes he wore a hat, and sometimes he didn’t; he was not at all particular about that; his shaggy red hair, he thought, protected his head well enough; as for what people would think of it—he did not live in Broadway, where one’s shoe-lacings are measured; his home was in the country, and a very wild, rocky country, at that; he knew much more about chip-munks, rattle-snakes, and birds’-eggs, than he did about fashions; he liked to sit rocking on the top of a great tall tree; or standing on a high hill, where the wind almost took him off his feet; he thought the sunset, with its golden clouds, “well enough,” but he delighted in a thunder-storm; when the forked lightning darted zig-zag across the heavy black clouds, blinding you with its brightness; or when the roaring thunder seemed to shake the very hills, and the gentle little birds cowered trembling in their nests for fear.
Andy’s house was a rough shanty enough, on the side of a hill; it was built of mud, peat and logs, with holes for windows; there was nothing very pleasant there; his mother smoked a pipe when she was notcooking or washing, and his father was a day laborer who spent his wages for whisky and tobacco. No wonder that Andy liked to rock on the top of the tall trees, and liked the thunder and lightning better than the eternal jangling of their drunken quarrels. Andy could hear the hum of busy life in the far-off villages; but he had never been there; he had no books, so he did a great deal of thinking, and he hoped some day to be something beside just plain Andy Moore, but how or when, the boy had not made up his mind. In the mean time, he grew, and slept, and ate, and thought—the very best thing at his age that he could have done, anywhere, had he but known it.
There was a railroad track near the hut of Andy’s father; and Andy often watched the black engine, with its long trail, as it came fizzing past, belching out great clouds of steam and smoke, and screeching through the valleys and under the hills like a mad demon. Although it went by the hut every day, yet he had never wished to ride in it; he had been content with lying on the sand bank, watching it disappear in the distance, leaving great wreaths of smoke curling round the treetops. One day as Andy was strolling across the track, he saw that there was something wrong about it; he did not know much about railroad tracks, because hewas as yet quite a little lad, but the rails seemed to be wrong somehow; and Andy had heard of cars being thrown off by such things. Just then, he heard a low distant noise; dear, dear, the cars were coming, coming then! He was but a little boy, but perhaps he could stop them in some way, at any rate there was nobody else there to do it. Andy never thought that he might be killed himself; but he went and stood right in the middle of the track, just before the bad place on it, that I have told you about, and stretched out his little arms as far as he could. On, on came the cars, louder and louder. The engineer saw the boy on the track, and whistled for him to get out of the way; Andy never moved a hair; again he whistled; Andy might have been made of stone, for all the notice he took of it; then the engineer of course had to stop the train, swearing as he did so, at Andy, for “not getting out of the way;” but when Andy pointed to the track, and he saw how the brave little fellow had not only saved his life but the lives of all the passengers, his curses changed to blessings, very quick. Every body rushed out to see the horrible death they had escaped, had the cars rushed over the bad track and tossed headlong down the steep bank into the river. Ladies kissed Andy’s rough freckled face, and cried over him; and the gentlemen,as they looked at their wives and children, wiped their eyes and said “God bless the boy;” and that is not all, they took out their porte-monnaies and contributed a large sum of money for him; not that they could ever repay the service he had done them; they knew that; but to show him in some way beside mere words, that they felt grateful. NowTHATboy had presence of mind. Good, brave little Andy! The passengers all wrote down his name, Andy Moore, and the place he lived in; and if you want to know where Andy is now, I will tell you. He is in college; and these people whose lives he saved, pay his bills and are going to see him safe through. Who dare say, now, when a little jacket and trowsers runs past, “It is only a boy!”