"I tell you I won't be called Felix. Whenever I hear the name it makes me feel as I did one day when my crutches slipped on the ice, and I fell on the pavement before the door, and some newsboys stood and laughed at me. Infelix Andrews! I want that written on my tombstone when I am buried."
He trembled from head to foot, and angry tears dimmed his large, flashing eyes, while Hattie sat with her elbows resting on her knees, and her chin in her hands, looking sorrowfully at her brother.
Edna put her arm around the boy's shoulder, and drew his head down on her lap, saying tenderly:
"Your mother did not mean that she was ashamed of her son, but only grieved and mortified by his ungovernable temper, which made him disrespectful to her. I know that she is very proud of your fine intellect, and your ambition to become a thorough scholar, and—"
"Oh! yes, and of my handsome body! and my pretty feet!"
"My dear little boy, it is sinful for you to speak in that way, and God will punish you if you do not struggle against such feelings."
"I don't see how I can be punished any more than I have been already.
To be a lame dwarf is the worst that can happen."
"Suppose you were poor and friendless—an orphan with no one to care for you? Suppose you had no dear, good little sister like Hattie to love you? Now, Felix, I know that the very fact that you are not as strong and well-grown as most boys of your age, only makes your mother and all of us love you more tenderly; and it is very ungrateful in you to talk so bitterly when we are trying to make you happy and good and useful. Look at little Lila, shut up in silence, unable to speak one word, or to hear a bird sing or a baby laugh, and yet see how merry and good-natured she is. How much more afflicted she is than you are! Suppose she was always fretting and complaining, looking miserable and sour, and out of humor, do you think you would love her half as well as you do now?"
He made no reply, but his thin hands covered his sallow face.
Hattie came close to him, sat down on the carpet, and put her head, thickly crowned with yellow curls, on his knee. Her uncle Grey had given her a pretty ring the day before, and now she silently and softly took it from her own finger, and slipped it on her brother's.