“Hold up your heads,” she cried to the violets. “Push yourselves forward where people may see you.”
But the violets held down their heads modestly.
Along came Lucy looking for some flowers. “Ugh! what a rank smell that weed has!” she cried. She plucked it up by the root and threw it on a heap of rubbish. But she gathered a great bunch of the dewy violets for her grandmother’s birthday.
ODDS AND ENDS
There was once on a time a maiden who was pretty but very lazy and wasteful. When a little knot came in the flax she was spinning, she at once pulled out a whole heap of it and threw it away. Her servant gathered up the bits of flax that had been thrown away, cleaned them, spun them, and wove them into a piece of fine linen. Out of this she made herself a beautiful dress.
Well, the maiden was to be married. On the eve of the wedding the servant was dancing about in the pretty dress she had made. The bride said to the bridegroom, “How that girl jumps about dressed in my odds and ends!” The bridegroom asked the bride what she meant. Then she told him that the servant was wearing a dress made of the flax she had thrown away. When the bridegroom heard that, he knew how lazy and wasteful she was.
“The other girl is the wife for me,” said he. And he married the other girl in the very dress she had made out of the odds and ends.
—Folk tale
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S KINDNESS
One day as Abraham Lincoln rode along on his horse he saw a pig struggling to keep herself from sinking into a deep place filled with mud. The poor thing was squealing in terror, because the mud was sucking her in.