Eye Service and Love Service

DEAN’s
Illustrated Farthing Books.
LONDON: DEAN & SON, 11, Ludgate Hill.

EYE SERVICE AND LOVE SERVICE.
When we serve those with whom we happen to be in a careless kind of way, and only because we are looked after, it is called eye service: but when we do so willingly and from a motive to please, it is then termed a service of love and affection.
I will tell you a story about the two sorts of service, and then you shall say which it is you ought to practise.
Two little girls, who had been carefully brought up by wise but poor parents, were one day left, in the time of harvest, to take care of a cottage, and to tend their little baby brother, who slept in the cradle. The mother was gone out to glean. She gave them their food and set them their tasks for the day, and carrying her own and her husband’s dinner in a basin, she bade them good-bye. The children were pleased with the new idea of being mistresses of the little cottage for so many hours. And as they were really good girls, it never entered their heads to do in their mother’s absence what they would have feared to do in her presence. Meggie therefore cleaned the door-step, as she had been told, and washed some socks for the baby; and Bessie, who was older and

stronger, carried out the basket of butter to several houses which their mother supplied. At noon they sat down to dinner. They were rather tempted to give little Dick, the baby, the things he cried for, in order to keep him quiet; but the words, “eye service,” came into their minds several times, and they resisted the temptation. After dinner was over, the children cleared away and went into the garden to play. They were very merry at bo-peep with baby, when a girl, called Jenny Bryant, popped her head over the hedge and said, “We have had fine sport to-day, come to our house, and we will show you what it is.” Now Jenny, although a near neighbour, was a girl with whom their mother did not like her little daughters to be intimate, for although a good-tempered child, she was not well brought up, and cared very little for her father and mother.