Parker's Second Reader / National Series of Selections for Reading, Designed For The Younger Classes In Schools, Academies, &C.

by Richard Green Parker

LESSON III.

The same subject, continued.

1. I have another lesson to teach you from the same story of the old man and the bundle of sticks, which I think will be very useful to you, and will make your lessons very much easier to you.

2. Whenever you have a lesson to learn, do not look at it all at once, and say, I cannot learn this long lesson; but divide it into small parts, and say to yourself, I will try to learn this first little part, and after I have learned that, I will rest two or three minutes, and then I will learn another little part, and then rest again a few minutes, and then I will learn another.

3. I think that in this way you will find study is not so hard a thing as it seemed to you at first, and you will have another explanation of that wise saying, Divide and conquer.

4. I will now tell you another story that I read when I was a little boy. It was called a fable. But before I tell you the story, I must tell you what a fable is.

5. A fable is a story which is not true. But, although it is not a true story, it is a very useful one, because it always teaches us a good lesson.

6. In many fables, birds and beasts are represented as speaking. Now, you know that birds and beasts cannot talk, and therefore the story, or fable, which tells us that birds and beasts, and other things, that are not alive, do talk, cannot be true.

7. But I have told you, that although fables are not true stories, they are very useful to us, because they teach us a useful lesson. This lesson that they teach is called the moral of the fable; and that is always the best fable that has the best moral to it, or, in other words, that teaches us the best lesson.

8. The story, or the fable, that I promised to tell you, is in the next lesson, and I wish you, when you read it, to see whether you can find out what the lesson, or moral, is which it teaches; and whether it is at all like the story of the father and the bundle of sticks, that I told you in the last lesson. While you read it, be very careful that you do not pass over any word the meaning of which you do not know.