them to the Police Station. The officers looked at them and said they were
worth nothing, but gave him a receipt for them.

On their way to the factory they turned into another public-house for a
drink, and while there Horne found one of the marbles loose in his coat
pocket. "Oh!" he said, "I've got one of them left." Holding it up in his
fingers, he looked round and asked, "Will any one give me a penny for it?"
But no one would have it.

In another public-house where they stopped, he offered the pearl for a
glass of beer, but no one accepted the offer. The pearl which was worth
many hundreds of pounds was despised by one and all. Then Horne offered it
for a packet of cigarettes, but again it was handed back with the remark,
"That's no good to me." So one of his friends suggested that he should
crush it under the heel of his boot as it was no good.

Later on when some one asked him what he had done with it he said he had
thrown it away.

It is a wonderful story and quite true. "Oh!" you say, "what a thousand
pities, if that man Horne had only known its value, it would have made him
a rich man in one day."

Are you not surprised that none of these men ever thought of finding out
the real value of that pearl? But is it not stranger still that scarcely
any one ever stops to inquire who Jesus Christ really is, and the meaning
of His death on the Cross? You listened just now with astonishment to the
questions and answers about this valuable pearl, and yet the same
questions are being asked every day about another Pearl, God's Pearl of
great price, and people are treating it with the same indifference. How