“Isn’t any fings there. Mamma’s locked ’em all up, ’cause my kep’ forgetting—no, cause my didn’t want to put ’em away when she said it was time”; and Tod stared straight up at the blue sky overhead.
“I hate ‘becauses,’” said Maybee emphatically,—“that kind, anyhow. I just had miserable times, my own self, all yesterday.”
“’Cause why?” asked Tod, with alacrity.
“Because my strings all knotted up tight—no; ’twasn’t, neither; I just wouldn’t say ‘Please,’ and the ‘becauses’ kept happening right along,—horrid, all of ’em. There’s always one with things you ought to do and don’t want to, and things you want awfully to do and mustn’t. They’re tied right tight on, too. And then there’s a nice kind, when you get a ticket because you’ve sewed your seam, or something. I wish they’d made ’em all like that.”
“Are you sure which is the best kind?” asked aunty, coming out on the stoop, and sitting down between them. “What did papa snip the baby’s hands for, this morning, Tod?”
“Oh! ’cause her will put her fingers in the sugar-blowl,” returned Tod contemptuously.
“Was that a good or bad ‘because’?”
“Why, my s’poses her don’t like to be snipped; but you know if we ’lowed her to touch fings, her might burn her on the teapot, an’ spill the gwavy, an’ every-fing; ’sides it isn’t polite, an’ we must learn her to behave,” concluded Tod, with an air of superior wisdom.
“That is just it,” said mamma, drawing the little reasoner into her lap. “We all need to learn a great many things that we should not if there were no ‘becauses.’ God lets the bad ‘becauses’ happen, as Maybee says, to teach us how to be better, or to keep us from something that would harm us. Let me tell you a little story all in rhyme, and then we’ll see if we can’t happen the ‘good becauses,’ by doing just what God wants us to.”