“I thought you’d find it rather hard to earn money. You ought to have waited until you had finished your work, and then you could have gone out to play.—But I don’t mean that you did wrong. You had a right, if you chose, to give up the plan of earning money, and have your play instead.”
“Why, Miss Anne, I almost finished the work. I pricked all but two lines.”
“Yes, but then you left the work of putting the things away to me; and that gave me about as much trouble as all your pricking did good. So you did not earn any thing.”
“Well,” said Lucy, “I will try this afternoon, while Royal is at his studies; and then he won’t want me to go out and play.”
She took s for her letter that afternoon, and she pricked all that she could find on the page. Then she put her work carefully away, all except the page itself, which she brought to Miss Anne, so that she might examine it. Miss Anne found that she had done it very well. She had pricked almost every one. Miss Anne looked it over very carefully, and could only find two or three which Lucy had overlooked.
After this, Lucy persevered for several weeks in pricking letters. She took a new letter every day, and she generally spent about half an hour at each lesson. She learned to be very still while she was thus engaged, saying nothing except to pronounce aloud the name of the letter when she pricked it, which Miss Anne said was a very important part of the exercise.
In this way, in process of time, she learned all the letters of the alphabet; and her father paid her the eight sixpences. With one of these sixpences she bought a fine black lead pencil, to draw with, and a piece of India rubber, to rub out her marks when they were made wrong.
Miss Anne also taught her how to make a purse to keep the rest of her money in; and when the purse was done, Lucy put the money into it, and got Miss Anne to let her keep it in one of her drawers. She was afraid it would not be quite safe in her treasury.
