There was something in Aunt Margaret’s voice which made Flora and the little girls who were visiting her stand very still and look up.
“You say,” continued Aunt Margaret very gently, “you say you love your beautiful bird. That you would feel dreadfully if it were torn to bits. How do you think its bird-mother felt when it was torn from her nest, and she never saw it again?”
“Oh,” said Flora, “I never thought of that before. I’m afraid,—I’m afraid I’m more to blame than the cat.”
DINAH’S NEW YEAR’S PRESENT.
Dinah Morris is a colored girl. She lives in the South. By South we mean in the southern part of the United States.
Dinah is one of the most good-natured children that ever lived, but she is very, very lazy. There is nothing she likes, or used to like, so much as to curl up in some warm corner in the sun and do nothing.
Dinah’s mother wished very much that her child should learn to read, but the lady who tried to teach her soon gave it up. “It is no use,” she said, “Dinah will not learn. She is not a stupid child, but she is too lazy for anything.”
It happened, soon after this, that a young man from Massachusetts came to the house where Dinah lived. He brought with him something no one else in the neighborhood had ever seen before—a pair of roller-skates.
When Dinah saw the young man going rapidly up and down the piazza on his skates she was so astonished she hardly knew what to think. She ran after him like a cat, her black eyes shining as they had never shone before.