Well, my father and mother had come up from a town near Boston, because my grandfather could give them some land here, and they built their house, and made it their home. The house stands now; it is the very one in which my brothers and sisters were all born.
In her parlor my mother had a very nice piece of furniture, which her mother had given her as a wedding present, and of which she was very proud,
inasmuch as no parlor in the county could boast the like. It was a looking-glass!
Well, laugh! No wonder it seems funny to you that any one should so prize a looking-glass, when you all have so many of them; but you can have no idea how different everything was then. The people were very poor, and, although they owned many acres of land, yet they could frequently sell it but for one dollar an acre, and thought that a fine bargain. You see we had no money to buy the elegant luxuries you have in your houses—the carpets, and sofas, and rocking-chairs. Our floors were hard, covered now and then with a little sand, perhaps, as a great luxury. The chairs were straight and high, while our tables were small and low, and the cups from which we drank our tea as small as those you play with. But, before I say any more, I want to tell you of the fate of mother's looking-glass.
The great room (as mother's parlor was called) was always kept carefully closed, and a very sacred, awful and mysterious place it was to us children. It so happened, one day when mother had gone away, that my little brother Fred began
to be acted upon very powerfully by a desire to take one peep into that room. By some strange neglect mother had left the door unlatched—for she kept her bonnet in there, and always put it on before the glass. The temptation to go in was altogether too powerful for Fred to withstand, and, especially as others had never pronounced the little monosyllable no, to him, he had no mind to begin by saying it to himself. So in he went, and almost the first thing he saw was mother's looking-glass, hanging over the table between the two front windows. As he went towards it he saw a little boy, who seemed to be peering and staring at him from between the windows. He had no idea it was himself he saw, never having seen the looking-glass before, nor his own reflected image. You may be sure he looked right earnestly upon the strange child. If he stepped forward, so did the boy; if he turned away, and then looked cautiously back to watch the boy, there he was, looking at him in a very sly manner. Freddy, enraged at this, rushed out for a stone, and, bringing it in, hurled it at the looking-glass. But it was all in vain, for, even after the glass rattled
down and strewed the floor with its many pieces, that impudent boy peeped at him from every bit of glass in which he looked.
When my mother came home, and went to put away her bonnet in the great room, as usual, she found her beautiful looking-glass lying on the floor, broken into a hundred pieces. When she came out, and demanded of us what it meant, Fred told her of a little boy he saw behind it, at whom he was offended and hurled a stone, but that still the boy looked at him from the pieces of glass and made him very angry.
Then mother laughed when she heard Fred's story, and, catching him up in her arms, kissed him again and again. She forgot to chide him for his disobedience in going where he had been forbidden to go, and for his foolish anger at the supposed boy. She was so much amused at his version of the story, that she did not explain to him what the boy was, and how the looking-glass reflected figures before it, but he was left to find that out by his experience afterwards.
If my brother, long before that, had learned lessons of love and forbearance, this circumstance,