“Mother, it seems to me you are discouraging me from trying to be a better boy.”
“No, Dwight; but I don't want you to depend on false hopes that must only end in your disappointment. Your determination will help in not indulging the bad feelings; but I want to have your heart changed so that you could not possibly have such feelings. I hope mine is. I once shewed the same spirit that you do; but now I don't think it would be possible for me to take any pleasure in teasing Caleb, or you, or David.
“I hope,” added Madam Rachel, “that God will give you a benevolent and tender heart, so that there shall be no tendency in you to do wrong. He will change yours, if you pray to him to do it. In fact, I hope, and sometimes I almost believe, that he has begun. I do not think you would have gone to Caleb to-day so pleasantly, and acknowledged your fault, as you did by your actions, and felt so totally different from what you had done, if God had not wrought some change in you. I have very often talked with children about such faults, as plainly and kindly as I did with you, and it produced no effect. When they went away, I found, by their looks and actions afterwards, that their hearts were not changed at all. And so, Dwight,” said she, “I have not been saying this to discourage you, but to make you feel that you need a greater change than you can accomplish, and so to lead you to God that you may throw yourself upon him, and ask him, not merely to help you in your determinations not to act out your bad feelings, but to change the very nature of them, or rather, to carry on the change, which I hope he has begun.”
Dwight remembered, while his mother was talking, how full his heart had been of kindness and love to Caleb, while he was helping him that afternoon, and he perceived clearly that he had not produced that state of mind by any of his own determinations that he would feel so before he actually did. He remembered how happy he had been at that time, and how discontented and miserable after he had been troubling Caleb; and he had a feeling of strong desire that God would change his heart, and make him altogether and always benevolent and kind.
Now, it happened that Caleb had not understood this conversation very well, and he began to be weary and uneasy. Besides just about this time he began to recollect something about his grandmother's beginning a story for him, when she took him up in her lap, after he came in from the mole. So, when he noticed that there was a pause in the conversation, he said,
“Grandmother, you promised to tell me a story about blind Samuel.”
“So I did,” said his grandmother smiling, “and I began it; but before I got through you got fast asleep.”
David and Dwight laughed, and so in fact did Caleb; and Madam Rachel then said that if he would tell David and Dwight the story as far as she had gone, she would finish it.
“Well,” said Caleb, “I will. Once there was a blind boy, and his name was Samuel; and, you see, he was going through the woods, and his father was with him. And his father walked along, and he walked along, and it was stony, and he said he would do just what his father said, because his father knew best,—and—and so he took hold of the string again.”
“What string?” said Dwight.