You all know what it is to have a birthday, when father and mother and sisters and cousins give you presents and perhaps you have a party. It’s not nearly as much fun if you have to share your birthday with a twin, but this is a story about twins, a boy and a girl named Robbie and Rosy. Their family wasn’t very well off and they often had to make do with things that their mother and father made for them. It was no different this year that we are going to hear about.
The week before their birthday, Father Ross said to Mother Ross, “The children will have to go without any birthday presents this year; we just can’t afford any.”
Mother Ross said, “They won’t think it’s a birthday without a present”.
Father Ross shook his head, for there was hardly enough money coming in to get the necessary food and clothes. Where was money for birthday presents to come from?
“We’ll have to make the presents,” said Mother Ross.
“Out of what?” said Father Ross, looking around the tiny two-room farm house where everything of the little they had was being used for some purpose. But mothers are great inventers, and Mother Ross was the best of them all.
“Here’s Rosy’s present,” she said that night. “Now you’ll have to make something for Robbie”.
Father laughed..,.what did Mother think she was going to make with that old curtain she had found in a cupboard?
“Rosy won’t thank you for that,” he said.
But it was no longer a curtain when Mother Ross got through with it. She had made the cutest doll you could see with a round head, and drawn in a face and curly hair. A visit to the barn where the oats were stored, and Dolly came back looking ever so plump. She now had insides, and when she was dressed in other scraps of material that Mother had found, there was a doll any little girl might have been glad to have.
When Father Ross saw what Mother had made out of nothing much, he set his mind to work, and pretty soon, out of a bit of wood, he had made a bow and arrow for Robbie with a target board to fire at.
So when the birthday of the twins came round, there was a present for each of them. Rosy loved that doll made out of the window curtain. It became as dear to her as a baby after a little while. At night she took it to bed with her, and at meal times, it
always sat on a chair at the table beside her. It took days to think up a name good enough, but finally she decided on Rosalie Gwendoline.
One day a sad thing happened. The twins had a bad quarrel. Robbie called Rosy names; Rosy went and told her mother, and Robbie got a scolding. That didn’t make him feel any more pleasant toward his sister.
“Old tattletale,” he said to himself, “I’ll make her sorry that she told on me.”
But how? That was the question. In what way could he get back at Rosy? While he was thinking about it, his eye lit on Rosalie Gwendoline . There she lay on the table; Rosy and his father and mother were out in the garden. It didn’t take a minute to stuff the precious doll inside his sweater. Robbie looked like a stuffed pig, but there was no one there to see him. Out of the back door he slipped, while Father and Mother and Rosy were busy in the front yard.
“I’ll show her, the mean tattletale,” he said, as he crossed the yard to back of the barn. When Rosy came hack to the house a little later, the first thing she did was to look for her beloved doll. There were not many places where a doll could hide in a two-room house, so it didn’t take very long to show her that Rosalie Gwendoljne was not there.
“Robbie, have you hidden your sister’s doll?” Mother asked.
And Robbie said, “No.”
“Well, a doll couldn’t run off by itself, and you were the only one in the house,” said his father. He looked so cross that Robbie was scared. He said, “The dog was in the house.”
That’s the way when you do anything wrong; you have to keep covering it over and over—first one lie, then another. Robbie may have covered himself with his lies, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
Since no amount of searching produced Rosalie Gwendoline, they agreed that Prince, the dog, must have carried her off in his mouth and perhaps chewed her to pieces outside. Robbie’s conscience smote him, but he tried to smother it, saying to himself, “No one can possibly find out.”
After a while he almost forgot about his misdeed, until one Sunday the minister preached on the text, “Be sure your sin will find you out,” and again he felt a prick of conscience, but he reassured himself by thinking, “The old doll’s deep in the ground; no one will ever find her.”
How Rosy missed her beloved doll, especially as a season of wet weather set in and she couldn’t get out to play. But the sun shone again it always does, no matter how long the rain lasts. Then one day Mr. Adams, who had the next farm to the Ross’, came into the house at dinner time.
“Well, what’s that you’ve been planting behind the barn?” he asked. “You’ve got it set out the strangest looking way I ever did see.”
Now Mr. and Mrs. Ross knew they hadn’t been planting anything there, and everyone was curious; so they got up from the dinner table and went out behind the barn. Sure enough, there was soft green peeping up from the earth, and it was an odd shape.
Father and Mother Ross, Mr. Adams, and Rosy all looked at it with curious, puzzled faces, all except for Robbie. Oh, his face grew pale, and on it came a look of terror, sheer terror , for there, outlined in the earth in living green, he saw the form of Rosalie Gwendoljne. There was no doubt about it, the head, body, arms, legs, could be seen as plain as could be. He didn’t know his mother had stuffed the doll with oats; he didn’t realise that the continued rains had rotted the old curtain that made the body of Rosalie Gwendoline….all he knew was that in some strange way his sin had found him out and was exposed to all eyes.
We must remember that God sees and knows everything we do….it is no use trying to hide anything from God. If we don’t own up now, one day we will have to face God with it still on our conscience, and that will be the most shameful and terrifying moment of our life.
