Nathan’s Gold

One morning, Chris Lightenhome, aged sixty-eight, received an unexpected sum of money of six hundred dollars. His good old face shone with joy. “I am never surprised at the Lord’s mercies,” he said, reverently. He thanked the Lord and went, with light- hearted steps to seek out his friend Nathan, aged twelve.

“Nathan,” he said, “I guess I am the oldest man in this poorhouse, but I feel just about your age. Suppose you and I get out of here.”

The boy smiled. He did not have a strong faith in God as did Chris although he was very old for twelve, even as Chris was very young for sixty-eight.

“For a poorhouse this is a good place,” continued Chris, still with that jubilant tone in his voice. “It is well conducted, just as the country reports say. Still there are other places that suit me better. You come and live with me, Nathan. What do you say to that?”

“Where are you going to live?” asked Nathan, hesitantly.
The old man looked at him approvingly. “You’ll never be one to take any chances will you?” he said. “You’ve got to learn to trust the Lord, but I have been looking around and I know of a room. I have had my eye on it for awhile. It is big enough to have a bed, a table, a cook-stove, and three chairs in it, and we could live there like lords. Just think of it! I can get it for two dollars a month.” “With all these things in it?” “No, with nothing in it. But I can buy the things, Nathan; get them cheap at the second-hand store. And I can cook as good as most women.” Then he looked eagerly into the unresponsive young face in front of him. “What’s the matter with my plan, Nathan?” he asked, gravely. “Why don’t you like it? I never knew you to hesitate like this before.”

“I have no money,” was the slow answer. “I can’t do my share toward it. And I’m not going to live off you.. Your money will last you twice as long if you don’t have to keep me. Six hundred dollars isn’t much. Soon you’ll run out and you will be back here again.”

For a moment the old man listened in silence, “I won’t spend it unwisely though,” he said. Then his face cleared, and he laughed. “So you haven’t any money, and you won’t let me keep you,” he continued, “well, those are pretty honourable standards. I expect to do away with them immediately.” He stood up and said, “‘That is gold which is worth gold. You’ve got the gold all right, Nathan, or the money, whichever you choose to call it.”

Nathan stared at the old man in wonderment. “Why, boy, look here!” Chris exclaimed as he took hold of the young man’s arm, which was used to much hard labour and had developed a good muscle. “There’s your gold, in that right arm of yours. What you want to do is get it out of your arm and into your pocket. I don’t need to keep you. You can live with me and keep yourself. What do you say now?”

The boy’s face lit up. “Let’s go today,” he said.
“Not today – tomorrow,” decided Chris. “When 1 was young, before misfortune met me and I was cheated out of all I had, I was used to having large dinners and inviting all the poor people to dine with me. We’ll give one tonight to those we used to be fellow paupers with until yesterday, and then tomorrow we will go. We began this year in the poorhouse; the Lord has blessed us so that we will end it in our own home. That is one of the bad beginnings that made a good ending, boy. There is more than one of them. Remember that.”

The next day came, and the little home was started. Another morning followed and Nathan began in earnest trying to get that gold out of his arm and into his pocket. He was a boy who liked to daydream and very few people had patience with him; for nobody, not even he, knew the resistless energy and perseverance that lay dormant within him. Chris, however, suspected it. “I believe,” he said to himself, “that Nathan, when he once wakes up, will be a person who knows how to hustle for work. But the poorhouse isn’t exactly the place to rouse up the ambition of the boy. Having a chance to scold somebody is what the Head mistress of the poorhouse calls one of the comforts of a home. And she certainly took out her comforts on Nathan and all the rest helped her – sort of deadening him, though. Living here with me and doing for himself is a little more like what’s needed in his case.”

Slowly Nathan began to wake 1 up and Chris had patience with him. He earned all he could, and he kept himself from being a burden on his only friend, but he disliked work, so he lagged over it. He did all that he did well, however, and he was thoroughly trustworthy..

Three years went by. Nathan was now fifteen years old, and Chris Lightenhome was seventy-one.
The little room had always been clean. There had been each day enough nourishing food to eat, though the old man, remembering the predictions of some people that his money would run out quickly, set his face like a flint against even the slightest indulgence in table luxuries. And, although there had been days when Nathan had recklessly brought home a ten-cent pie and half dozen doughnuts from the bakers as his share of the food for their common dinner, Chris felt that he had managed well. And now there were only fifty dollars of the original six hundred left, and the poorhouse was looming once more on the old man’s sight. He sighed. An expression of patience grew on the kind old face. He felt it to be a great pity that six hundred dollars could not be made to go farther. And there was wistfulness in the glance he cast upon the boy. Nathan was, as yet, only half awake. The little room and the taste of honest independence had done their best. Were they to fail?

The’ old man began to economize. His mittens wore out. He did not buy more. He needed new pants. He did not buy them. Instead he tried to patch the old ones, and Nathan coming in suddenly saw him doing It.

“Why, Uncle Chris!” he exclaimed. “What are you patching those old things for? Why don’t you just get new ones?”
The old man kept silent till he had his needle threaded. Then he said, softly, with a half-apology in his voice, “The money’s almost gone, Nathan.”

The boy stared. He knew as well as Chris that when the last coin was spent, the doors of the poorhouse would open once more to receive his only friend. A thrill of gladness went through Nathan as he realized he could provide for himself and that he did not need to return to the poor house. And by that thrill in his own heart he guessed the feeling of his friend. He could not put what he guessed into words. Nevertheless, he felt sure that the old man would not falter nor complain because of his faith in God.

“How much do you have?” he asked.
Chris told him. Then without a word, Nathan got up and went out. His head sunk in thought, and his hands in his pockets, He sauntered on in the wintry air while he mentally calculated how long Chris’s funds would last. “He will be lucky to make it to Christmas before going to the poorhouse again.” He walked only a few steps. Then he stopped. “Will he?” he cried. “Not if I can help it.”

This was a big decision for a boy of fifteen. The next morning Nathan had second thoughts. He thought of changing his mind about the high task, which he had the previous day laid before himself. Then he looked at Chris, who had aged considerably in the last month, he was fast asleep still. Evidently he had lain awake in the night calculating how long his money would last. The sight of him made Nathan renew his resolve. “I am just going to dig out all the gold there is in me. Keeping Uncle Chris out of the poorhouse is worth it.” Perhaps if I pray to God as Chris often does, then I will have the strength to carry through with my plans. Then it was that Nathan asked the Lord to help him in his resolve. Never before had he felt such a need of his Saviour until now.

But he did not tell the old man. “He would say it was too big a job for me, and talk about how I ought to get some schooling,” concluded the boy.

Now it came about that the room, which, while it had not been the palace of lords, it had been the home of kingly kindness, at this time it became a silent place. The anxious old man had no heart to joke any more. He had been to the poorhouse, and had escaped from it into freedom. His whole nature rebelled at the thought of returning. And yet he tried to prepare himself to look forward to it bravely. “If it is the Lord’s will,” he told himself, “I will have to accept it.”
Meanwhile those who employed Nathan were finding him a very different boy from the slow, lagging Nathan they had known. If he was sent on an errand, he went fast. “Here! Get the gold out of your legs,” he would say to himself. If he sprouted potatoes for a grocer in his cellar, “There’s gold in your fingers, Nathan,” he would say. “Get it out as quick as you can.”

He now worked more hours in a day than he had ever worked before, so that he was too tired to talk much at meals, and too sleepy in the evening. But there was a light in his eyes when they rested on Christ that made the old man’s heart thrill.
“Nathan would stand by me if he could,” he would say to himself. “He’s a good boy. I must not worry him.”

A month after Nathan had begun his great labour of love, an astonishing thing happened to him. He had a choice of two places which offered him employment as general utility boy in a grocery. At one time he would have told Christ and asked his advice as to which offer he should take, but he was now carrying his own burdens. He considered carefully, and then he went to Mr. Benson.

“Mr. Benson,” he said, “Mr. Dale wants me, too, and both offer the same wages. Now which one of you will give me my groceries at a reduced price as you do your other clerks?”

“I will not,” replied Mr. Benson, firmly. “Your demand is ridiculous. You are not a clerk.”
The irate Mr. Benson turned on his heel, and Nathan felt himself dismissed. He then went to Mr. Dale, to whom he honestly related everything that happened. Mr. Dale laughed, “But you are not a clerk,” he said, kindly.
“I know it, but I mean to be, and I mean to do all I can for you, too.”

Mr. Dale looked at him, and he liked the bearing of the lad. “Go ahead,” he said. “You may have your groceries at the same rate I give the clerks.”

“Thank you,” responded Nathan, while the gratitude he felt crept into his voice. “For myself,” he said, “I would not have asked for a reduction, but for Uncle Chris I will. I have a big job on hand.”

That day he told Chris that he had found a job at Mr. Dale’s and that he was to have a reduction on groceries. “Which means, Uncle Chris, that I pay for the groceries for us both, while you do the cooking and pay the rent.”

Silently and swiftly Chris did some calculations in his mind. He saw that if he were spared of buying his own groceries, he could easily stay well. past Christmas. The poorhouse receded a little from the foreground of his vision as he gazed into the eyes of the boy opposite him at the table. He did not know that his own eyes spoke eloquently of his deliverance, but Nathan choked as he went on eating.

“Now hustle, Nathan!” he commanded one day on his way back to the store. “There’s gold in your eyes if you keep them open, and in your tongue if you keep it civil, and in your back and in your wits if they are nimble. All I have to say is, Ask God to help you get it out.”

“Lord, help me to get it out by using my talents and strength to the best of my ability,” he repeated when he had reached the rear of the store. He began busily filling and labeling kerosene cans, gasoline cans, and molasses jugs. From there he went to the cellar to measure up potatoes.

“Never saw such a fellow!” grumbled his workmate. “You’d think he runs the store by himself the way he steps around with his head up and his sharp eyes seem to be in everything. ‘Hi there’ he said to me. ‘Fill that measure of gasoline full before you pour it into the can. Mr. Dale doesn’t want the name of giving short measure because you are careless.’ Let’s do some reporting on him, and get him out of the store,” he said. “But there’s nothing to report and there never will be.”
But the boy persisted, and very shortly he found himself out of a job.

“You don’t have to get another boy if you don’t want to Mr.. Dale,” observed Nathan, cheerily. “I am so used to the place now that I can do all he did, as well as my own work. And, anyway, I would rather do the extra work than go on watching somebody to keep him from measuring up short or wrong grade on everything he touches.” Nathan smiled. He had lately discovered that he no longer hated to work.

Mr. Dale smiled in return. “Very well,” he said. “Go ahead and do it all if you want to.”
A week went by, and at the end of that time he found, to his delight, that Mr. Dale had increased his wages. “Did you think r would take the work of two boys and pay for the work of one?” asked Mr. Dale.

“I didn’t think at all, sir,” replied Nathan, joyously; “But I am the happiest boy in town to get a raise.”
“Uncle Chris,” he said that night, I got a raise today.”

Chris expressed his pleasure, and his sense that the honour was well merited, but Nathan did not hear a word he said, because he had something more to say himself.

“Uncle Chris,” he went on, his face very red, “I have been saving up for some time, and tomorrow’s your birthday. Here is a present for you.” And he thrust out a ten-dollar piece, with the words, “I never gave a present to anyone before.”

Slowly the old man took the money. and again his eyes outdid his tongue in speaking his gratitude. And there was a great glow in the heart of the boy.

“That’s some of the gold the Lord helped me to dig out, Uncle Chris,” he laughed. “You are the one who first told me it was in me. I do not know whether it came out of my arms or my legs or my head. And it was you who inspired my faith in God to give me strength to dig.”

“I know where the best gold there is in you located, Nathan,” smiled the old man. “It is your heart that is gold, my boy. The Lord has changed your heart to a heart of gold.”

Two months later Nathan was a clerk at twenty-five dollars a month. “Now we’re fixed, Uncle Chris!” He cried, when he told the news. “You and I can live forever on twenty-five dollars a month.”

“Do you mean it?” asked the old man, tremblingly. “Do you wish to be burdened with me?”
“No, I do not, Uncle Chris,” answered the boy, with a smile on his face. “I do not want to be burdened with you. I just want to go on living here with you.”

Then to the old man the poorhouse forever receded from sight. He looked with pride and tenderness on the boy who stood erect and alert in front of him, looked again and yet again, for he saw in him the Lord’s deliverer, though he knew not that he had been raised up by his own kind hand. Together they knelt to thank the Lord for His goodness.