“I want to take journeys, and to leave off learning some things that are tiresome, and to learn others that must be very entertaining; and I want to send Farmer Rickham’s children to school, and to build an hospital here, and several other things. What a will I would make, if I was a woman!”
“If you had any thing to leave, I suppose you mean,” said her father, laughing. “But, seriously, my dear, don’t you think it as well that people should be taught to do no harm before they form grand schemes for doing good; and that they should learn to do good in a small way, before they form plans too large for them to manage?”
“Like Sally Benson and her bird.”
“What was that?”
“She thought she should like to help her brother’s birds in building their nests; (you know he has three pairs, in a very large cage;) so she got them some moss that she thought better than what he had provided, and she went a great distance to get it; and she was a long time searching for a plant that she was told they would like to eat; and she watched and watched them, and was very busy trying to make them build. But O, papa!”
“Well, what happened?”
“Why, she frightened them so with putting her fingers between the wires, that they would not make their nests properly; and she had got the wrong plant after all, and one of them died from eating it. And what was far worse, she forgot, all the time, to feed her own canary; and she found it dead at the bottom of the cage one day.”
“Aye, that is the way with young minds till they get experience; and I am afraid it would be the way with you, if you had more of your own will, as you say.”
“Why, papa, what harm do you think I should do?”
“Consider whether you do none already. Have you done nothing on this one day that can be hurtful to anybody? You need not tell me, if you find you have; but satisfy yourself—that’s all.”