Too Late to Save the Boy

Dr. DAN CrAwForD once told me a story which made me weep as he told it, and it made him weep, too, even as he told it to me. One of his African boys had been mortally wounded in the hunt. He heard the news of that boy’s condition and started on the long trek to his side in the African jungle.

The mission was a long distance away, and when Dan Crawford arrived the dying boy looked up at him and cried out, “Oh, Bwana! I am dying because I did not meet you sooner. ‘The mission was too far away, yet a man shall be for refuge and you were my man, and you would have saved me had you come in time!” With a choke in his voice, Dan Crawford added, ‘””Chat was the most tragic sentence I have ever heard in dark Africa, ‘Had you come in time!’ There was regret, pathos, love, finality in it.

I still shudder when I hear it!” I remember a haunting personal story which Martha Berry told me a few years ago. She had heard of a little girl who wanted an education. Martha Berry visited that child’s mother and learned that Loretta, only a few days before, had tired of plowing fields, washing, scrubbing, cooking, and had run away from home with a boy of eighteen years.

Loretta was only fifteen. Martha Berry went to see Loretta and asked her why she had not waited until she was older to marry and why she had not tried to get an education. Loretta was doing all the washing for her new husband’s family. Daily she milked the cows.

She had never owned a pair of shoes in her life and was slaving away in the hope of being able to buy a pair so that she could go to meetin’ as a married woman should. Loretta was a beautiful child with red hair and pale cheeks like a piece of porcelain. It seemed tragic that she was slaving for fifteen people who lived in a single-room cabin. Martha Berry saw in Loretta an infinite capacity for education but she had found her too late.

Loretta leaned close to Miss Berry as she was leaving and whis- pered: “I wish’t you’d of come sooner! I wish’t it so!”