The mother's keen eye saw the tears he couldn't keep back.
"What's the matter, Boy?" she tenderly asked while his father was at the stable putting the wagon under the shed.
"I don't know 'm," he choked. "I'm all on fire--I'm burnin' up----"
She touched his forehead and slipped her arm around his shoulders.
The mother looked into his face with a sudden start.
"Why, what on earth, child? What have you been doing to-day?"
He hesitated and tried to be brave, but it was no use. He felt that he would drop dead the next moment unless relief came. He buried his face in her lap and sobbed his bitter confession.
"Do you think I'm going to die?" he asked.
"No, my Boy, you're only sunburned. How long were you naked in the sun?"
"From 'bout ten o'clock till nearly sundown----"
The mother tenderly undressed the little, red, swollen body. The rough clothes had stuck to the blistered skin in one place and the pain was so frightful he nearly fainted before they were finally removed.
For two days and nights she never left his side, holding his hand to give him courage when he was compelled to move. Almost his entire body, inch by inch, was blistered. She covered it with cream and allowed only two greased linen cloths to touch him.
On the second day as he lay panting for breath and holding her hand with feverish grasp he looked into her pensive grey eyes through his own bleared and bloodshot with pain and said softly:
"It's all right, my Boy; your mother loves you."
"I'm not sorry for the pain," he gasped. "What hurts me worse is that you're so sweet to me!"
The dark face bent and kissed his trembling lips:
"It's all for the best. You couldn't have understood the preacher Sunday when he took the text: 'The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.' You learned it for yourself the only way we really learn anything. God's in the wind and rain, the sun, the storm. All nature works with him. You can easily fool your mother. It's not what you seem to others; it's what you are that counts. God sees and knows. You see and know in your little heart. I want you to be a great man--only a good man can ever be great."
And so for an hour she poured into his heart her faith in God and His glory until He became the one power fixed forever in the child's imagination.