And when she
went home she told her parents--I only learned
this afterward--that she was going to save money
to help build the larger church and Sunday-school
that Dr. Conwell wanted! Her parents pleasantly
humored her in the idea and let her run errands
and do little tasks to earn pennies, and she began
dropping the pennies into her bank.
``She was a lovable little thing--but in only a
few weeks after that she was taken suddenly ill
and died; and at the funeral her father told me,
quietly, of how his little girl had been saving money
for a building-fund. And there, at the funeral,
he handed me what she had saved--just fifty-
seven cents in pennies.''
Dr. Conwell does not say how deeply he was
moved; he is, after all, a man of very few words
as to his own emotions. But a deep tenderness
had crept into his voice.
``At a meeting of the church trustees I told of
this gift of fifty-seven cents--the first gift toward
the proposed building-fund of the new church that
was some time to exist. For until then the matter
had barely been spoken of, as a new church building
had been simply a possibility for the future.
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