“Mother,” she said, soberly, when she lay down in her little bed that night, “I’m going to ask God to keep me humble.”
“Why, my dear?”
“Because I feel tempted to be proud,—I can make such good bread!”
A DOG’S MISSION.
Hobbies.
He bores everybody to death with his locomotive as artlessly as grown people do with their hobbies.
Our Charley.
When the blaze of the wood-fire flickers up and down in our snug evening parlor, there dances upon the wall a little shadow, with a pug nose, a domestic household shadow—a busy shadow—a little restless specimen of perpetual motion, and the owner thereof is “our Charley.” Now we should not write about him and his ways, if he were strictly a peculiar and individual existence of our own home-circle; but it is not so. “Our Charley” exists in a thousand, nay, a million families; he has existed in millions in all time back; his name is variously rendered in all the tongues of the earth; in short, we take “our Charley” in a generic sense, and we mean to treat of him as a little copy of the grown man—enacting in a shadowy ballet by the fireside all that men act in earnest in after life. He is a looking-glass for grown people, in which they may see how certain things become them—in which they may sometimes even see streaks and gleamings of something wiser than all the harsh conflict of life teaches them.