"You see, my dear Arabella, the consequence of your curious and suspicious temper: I wished to make you a present to-day, because it is your birthday, but you will not allow your friends to procure you an agreeable surprise; for nobody in the house can take a single step, or do the least thing, without your watching and following them. I know you have long wished to have a white pigeon, and I have walked two long miles in all this heat, to get one for you. I sat down here, that I might have time to contrive how I should get it into the house without your seeing it, because I did not wish to give you my present till after dinner, when papa and mamma will give you theirs; and whilst I was endeavouring to think on some way to escape your prying eyes, I was so over-powered with fatigue and heat, that I fell fast asleep; and I see you have taken that time to peep into my basket, and save me any farther trouble. You have let my present fly away: I am sorry for it, my dear sister, but you have no one to blame but yourself; and I must confess that I am not half so sorry for your loss, as I am for the fate which attends two poor little young ones which are left in the basket, and who, far from being able to take wing, and follow their mother, are not old enough even to feed themselves, and must soon perish for want of food."
William's words were but too true; the poor things died the next morning, and Arabella passed the whole day in unavailing tears, regret, and sorrow.
THE UNSETTLED BOY.
"I do not think, at last, that I shall like to be a surgeon," said Gustavus to his papa, as he trotted by his side on his little poney. "Edward Somerville is to be a clergyman: and he has been telling me that he is to go to Oxford, and then he is to have a living, and will have a nice snug parsonage-house, and can keep a horse, and some dogs, and have a pretty garden; whilst I shall be moped up in a town, curing wounds, and mending broken bones—I shall not like it at all."
"It was your own choice," answered his papa; "but if you think you should like better to take orders, I am sure I have no objection."
Three months after this conversation, Gustavus being invited to accompany some friends to see a review, he returned home with his little head so filled with military ideas, that he was certain, he said, nothing could be so delightful and so happy as the life of an officer; and that travelling about and seeing different places was better than all the snug parsonage-houses in England. But, not many months from that time, going with his papa to Portsmouth, to visit his elder brother, who belonged to the navy, he was so struck with the novelty of the scene (having never seen a man of war before), thought there was so much bustle and gaiety in it, that it must be the pleasantest life in the world, and earnestly requested that he might be allowed to go to sea.
His papa now thought it time to represent to him the folly and imprudence of being so unsettled. "My dear boy," said he, taking him affectionately by the hand, "if you continue thus changing your mind every three months, you will never be any thing but an idle fellow, and your youth will be lost in preparations for different professions; or, should you remain long enough fixed to have entered into any line of life, you will not be long before you will desire to quit it for another, of which you will probably be entirely ignorant, and by that means ruin your fortune, and expose yourself to ridicule.
"You make me recollect two boys I once knew, and whose story has often been the subject of conversation, in a winter's evening, at the house of an old clergyman, from whom I received the first principles of the virtuous education my father had the goodness to bestow upon me.
"Robin was the son of a farmer who lived in the village; his uncle kept a grocer's shop in the next market town, and had a son named Richard. They were very clever boys, both understood the business they had been bred to extremely well, and, at the age of sixteen, were become very useful to their parents; but about that time they took it into their heads to grow tired of the employment they were engaged in, and to wish to change places with each other; Robin fancying that he should like extremely to be a grocer, and Richard, that nothing could possibly be so pleasant and agreeable as working in the fields.