“O Maggie and Bessie! what do you fink? It is my birfday next week, and papa told me to choose what he should give me, and I can’t think of any thing I want. Do you know any thing I want?”
“Well, no,” said Maggie. “I think you have about every thing a sensible child could want. I can’t remember a single thing; and that is rather a bad business not to have some thing you want for your birthday present. I think, after all, maybe it is a better economy not to have all you want; but to save up your wishes, so you can think of something when any person tells you to choose a present.”
Maggie said this with her wiseacre air, and Belle and Bessie listened with solemn admiration, believing it to be a speech containing a great deal of wisdom; nor, indeed, do I know that they were far wrong.
“How much is your father going to cost for your present?” asked Bessie.
“I asked him that,” said Belle; “and he said that ’pended on what I wanted. He said if it was a locket or necklace, or any thing that would keep till I was a big girl, he would not mind giving a good deal of money for it, he had to give me a present from mamma and himself too; but if it was only a toy I could break or be tired of in a little while, it would not be right to frow away much money on it. That is just what he said. I ’member it very well. But I don’t want a locket or those kind of things, there’s a whole lot of my own mamma’s pretty things I can have when I’m a big girl. Papa is keeping them for me, and I like those best. And I can’t think of a toy, not one;” and Belle looked quite melancholy over her want of wants.
“Yes,” said Maggie again, “I b’lieve you have every thing in the world a child could want.”
“Not my mamma,” said Belle, with the touch of sadness which always came over her when she thought or spoke of her dead mother.
“Dear Belle,” said Maggie, tenderly. “But then God gives us our mammas; and I only meant things that earth people could give you.”
“And, Belle, darling,” said Bessie, “your mamma is yours yet, even if she has gone to Jesus! It is only that she is more of Jesus’s, and He is more of hers now she is in His home with Him.”
Belle wiped away the tears which had gathered in her eyes; and then, with Bessie’s arm about her neck, and Maggie holding her hand, sat gazing up into the cloudless, blue sky, almost as if she expected to see the face of her “angel-mother” looking down with tender love upon her.