“Did he?” The minister’s voice was polite, but his eyes had gone back to the dried leaf on the ground.

“Yes, and I used to ask him just as I did you if he was glad he was a minister.”

The man under the tree smiled a little sadly.

“Well—what did he say?”

“Oh, he always said he was, of course, but ‘most always he said, too, that he wouldn’t stay a minister a minute if ’twasn’t for the rejoicing texts.”

“The—what?” The Rev. Paul Ford’s eyes left the leaf and gazed wonderingly into Pollyanna’s merry little face.

“Well, that’s what father used to call ’em,” she laughed. “Of course the Bible didn’t name ’em that. But it’s all those that begin ‘Be glad in the Lord,’ or ‘Rejoice greatly,’ or ‘Shout for joy,’ and all that, you know—such a lot of ’em. Once, when father felt specially bad, he counted ’em. There were eight hundred of ’em.”

“Eight hundred!”

“Yes—that told you to rejoice and be glad, you know; that’s why father named ’em the ‘rejoicing texts.’ “

“Oh!” There was an odd look on the minister’s face. His eyes had fallen to the words on the top paper in his hands— “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” “And so your father—liked those ‘rejoicing texts,’ “ he murmured.

“Oh, yes,” nodded Pollyanna, emphatically. “He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count ’em. He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it—some. And father felt ashamed that he hadn’t done it more. After that, they got to be such a comfort to him, you know, when things went wrong; when the Ladies’ Aiders got to fight—I mean, when they didn’t agree about something,” corrected Pollyanna, hastily. “Why, it was those texts, too, father said, that made him think of the game—he began with me on the crutches—but he said ’twas the rejoicing texts that started him on it.”

“And what game might that be?” asked the minister.

“About finding something in everything to be glad about, you know. As I said, he began with me on the crutches.” And once more Pollyanna told her story—this time to a man who listened with tender eyes and understanding ears.

A little later Pollyanna and the minister descended the hill, hand in hand. Pollyanna’s face was radiant. Pollyanna loved to talk, and she had been talking now for some time: there seemed to be so many, many things about the game, her father, and the old home life that the minister wanted to know.

At the foot of the hill their ways parted, and Pollyanna down one road, and the minister down another, walked on alone.

In the Rev. Paul Ford’s study that evening the minister sat thinking. Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of paper—his sermon notes. Under the suspended pencil in his fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank—his sermon to be. But the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or of what be intended to write. In his imagination he was far away in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor, sick, worried, and almost alone in the world—but who was poring over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had told him to “rejoice and be glad.”