Bessie and Ben were ready to fight the battles of their Master; but they surely did not know when they went to school that morning that the schoolroom was to be a battle-ground, and that they had a struggle—or, rather, several struggles—before them.
Bessie was the first to be attacked. There came up to her an impish little dwarf called Mischief. He urged her to play a trick on the girl in front of her, but Bessie made a vigorous dive into her books, and that scared him away.
Next at Ben there came the big giant Laziness, and tried to draw his book away from him, but Ben set his teeth firmly together, and made a plunge,—not at the giant, but at his slate and his book,—and that drove the giant away.
It was Bessie’s turn next, and she was beset by the goblin Carelessness, that tried to get her to throw aside her geography before she had half mastered the lesson. Bessie, however, went back over the pages, and reviewed the lesson diligently, and that was the end of that skirmish.
Ben, in the meantime, had gone up to the recitation benches, and he met there the little brownie called Impudence, who tried to urge him on to be saucy to his teacher; but with the single thought of his teacher’s kindness Ben drove the brownie away.
At recess time Bess came pretty near falling in a sharp fight with an ugly little sprite called Selfishness that tried to get her to run away and have fun with a jolly group of playmates. Bess saw through his designs, however, and got the better of him by linking arms with a poor little girl who was unpopular because her clothes were ragged and her shoes out at the toes. She went off with her and had a delightful recess.
While this was going on, Ben was having a tussle in another corner of the playground with an impish little hobgoblin known as Disobedience. The hobgoblin got behind him and tried to push him over the fence into Farmer Johnson’s orchard, where he had no business to be, but Ben turned and walked away, and the hobgoblin was defeated.
And so it was that Bessie and Ben came off victorious from this school battlefield, simply because they had Christ in their hearts to help them fight their foes.