A GROUP of bright-faced girls boarded a train one day, on their way for a day’s outing in the country. Once seated, their attention was attracted to a desperate looking man in the charge of a policeman, who was sitting near them.
“A jail-bird,” whispered Jane, with a scornful look on her pretty face. “I wish we had gone into another car.”
“He can’t hurt us,” replied the girl beside her, “see he is handcuffed.”
“Poor fellow,” whispered Sue, looking with pity on the hardened criminal, who by his attitude seemed to have caught the meaning of the girls’ looks, though their words failed to reach his ears. “I believe I will give him this rose,” she continued, choosing the nicest one from a bouquet she was carrying.
“I thought that one was for your Aunt Ruth,” urged her friend. “You said this morning that you would not have picked it for anyone but for her.”
“I had not seen this poor lonely man then,” insisted Sue. And suiting her actions to her words, she crossed the aisle and laid the beautiful rose in his lap.
Tears sprang to his eyes as he took up the rose in his imprisoned fingers, and turning to the young girl he said in a husky voice, “God bless you for your kindness to a poor castaway. It is many a day since I had a word of cheer from anyone.”
The train went on its way, whirring him away to the prison that for five long years was to be his home. But the gift of the rose had touched the poor man’s heart. He thought of his old mother who had died brokenhearted, his wife, and the child who was worse than fatherless. And he bowed his head in silence and prayed to the One he had neglected all his life.
He took the rose with him into his gloomy cell and when it withered, he pressed it between the leaves of his Bible—a book he soon learned to love and prize above all others. And it was from that Book that he learned of the Saviour, who loved him and gave Himself for him. He learned to love and trust in the Lord Jesus and became a true Christian, serving out his term of imprisonment in an honorable way.
When he came out from behind the bars, he lived a noble Christian life among his fellowmen and became the means of leading many others to Christ, telling them of Him who had saved his soul and who could save theirs also. How the Lord Jesus loves to have us tell others of His love to us, for He loved us and gave Himself to save us from our sins.
ML-03/25/1962