3000 MILES TO GET A CHEAP TOY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2134, 7 March 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

3000 MILES TO GET A CHEAP TOY.

A wealthy woman recently travelled clear across this entire continent from the Pacific Coast to an Eastern city for the sole purpose of securing a cheap old toy —a little, broken, wooden bureau. Of itself it was li-ot worth a penny, but it- belonged to this mother when she was a child. “I was a poor little motherless

thing,” she said in explanation, “and my father gave tlie little bureau to me. Every evening when lie came homo I would carry it out under the trees, and Father and 1 would plav with it.”

The father was a busy man. That was the only time the little girl had liim to herself, and the little 'toy came to mean home and childhood to her. And hearing recently that it still existed she travelled three thousand miles to get it anil to feel that it was her own again. This little story is on a par with the statement recently made by one of the wealthiest men in America. “My mother,” said this great capitalist, “once gave me a desk when I was a mite of a boy. We were very poor. She made it herself out of an old box. But it had a drawer and it was painted white, and it had a real lock and key. She gave the key into my hand. There never was a boy so proud. I was at last a man! It made our old house seem like a palace. I have that desk yet.” We do mot realize how little it takes sometimes to make home a dear and sacred place to a child. It does not need money nor fashion. It is not- style nor art. The home may be the meanest little shack on a Western prairie, but the father or mother can bring into tjqit- homo a spark of God’s lire to light- the whole life of a child. In every eye and in every country the things which make a home a foundation for a child’s life are love and tact -finding voice in actual objects to he shared and loved by the little beginner of the Jong journey. It may only be a cheap toy or a home-made desk, or a boy’s or girl’s own room however cheaply furnished, but something Flint is that child’s “very” own. It is tho thing in the house that actually belongs to the little life that naturally is sacred to it. It is the child’s own solid possession ; it is the anchor in tho homo.