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THE GOOD AND BAD FAIRIES.

Two houses stood side by side, as much alike as two twins. Honeysuckle and sweetbrier climbed over the rustic porches, flowers bloomed gayly in the gardens, and the warm sun shone equally on both. In each lived a little girl who had an invisible fairy companion. The children were the same size, the same age, and had the same advantages, with this difference, that the one fairy was good and the other bad.

A ray of sunshine glides through the window into the first house, and shines encouragingly on little Minnie, who is trying to do her lessons.

But the bad fairy has set her pygmies to work. One persuades her that she will do her lessons better if she sits in an easy-chair, another puts a cushion at her back, while a third fans her face so gently that the soft breeze, fragrant with honeysuckle and sweetbrier, soon sends her off to sleep, but not to rest. To her dismay the pygmy sweep comes round the corner, and with his sooty brush sweeps the pages of her new atlas. The coalheavers turn over her inkstand upon it, and the black fluid comes streaming down. Aunt Susan's sharp voice calls out, "Mind your dress, you naughty child."

Minnie puts her hand across it; but the fireman quickly pulls aside the table-cloth, runs his finger down the stream, and her lap is a pool of ink.

"Won't you catch it?" says an old woman, with a delighted chuckle; and the pygmy under the table crawls out, grinning with pleasure.

"We can take the horse to the water, if we cannot make him drink," shouts a newsboy in her ear; and with a great deal of tugging and thumping she feels herself driven closer to her books. But idle hands make an idle brain, and the pages seem only a blank.