Somehow, none of these seem to have interested little Agnes, or been of the least good to her. Her pound and a half of the best of the modern pious and picturesque is (being of course originally boardless) now a crumpled and variously doubled-up heap, brought down in a handful, or lapful, rather; most of the former insides of the pamphlets being now the outsides; and every form of dog’s ear, puppy’s ear, cat’s ear, kitten’s ear, rat’s ear, and mouse’s ear, developed by the contortions of weary fingers at the corners of their didactic and evangelically sibylline leaves. I ask if I may borrow one to take home and read. Agnes is delighted; but undergoes no such pang of care as a like request would have inflicted on my boyish mind, and needed generous stifling of;—nay, had I asked to borrow the whole heap, I am not sure whether Agnes’s first tacit sensation would not have been one of deliverance.
Being very fond of pretty little girls, (not, by any [[33]]means, excluding pretty—tall ones,) I choose, for my own reading, a pamphlet[1] which has a picture of a beautiful little girl with long hair, lying very ill in bed, with her mother putting up her forefinger at her brother, who is crying, with a large tear on the side of his nose; and a legend beneath: ‘Harry told his mother the whole story.’ The pamphlet has been doubled up by Agnes right through the middle of the beautiful little girl’s face, and no less remorselessly through the very middle of the body of the ‘Duckling Astray,’ charmingly drawn by Mr. Harrison Weir on the opposite leaf. But my little Agnes knows so much more about real ducklings than the artist does, that her severity in this case is not to be wondered at.
I carry my Children’s Prize penny’s-worth home to Brantwood, full of curiosity to know “the whole story.” I find that this religious work is edited by a Master of Arts—no less—and that two more woodcuts of the most finished order are given to Harry’s story,—representing Harry and the pretty little girl, (I suppose so, at least; but, alas, now with her back turned to me,—the cuts came cheaper so,) dressed in the extreme of fashion, down to her boots,—first running with Harry, in snow, after a carriage, and then reclining against Harry’s shoulder in a snowstorm.
I arrange my candles for small print, and proceed to read this richly illustrated story.
Harry and his sister were at school together, it appears, [[34]]at Salisbury; and their father’s carriage was sent, in a snowy day, to bring them home for the holidays. They are to be at home by five; and their mother has invited a children’s party at seven. Harry is enjoined by his father, in the letter which conveys this information, to remain inside the carriage, and not to go on the box.
Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills. And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it; a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time; warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the carriage.
Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly, whether [[35]]the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world, if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes?
Intended to produce, I say: what effect it does produce, I can easily ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it? Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’
Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one, and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses are to drive in carriages? That is their [[36]]Utopia. Mine, so much abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.
Nay, but perhaps, the learned editor did not intend the story for children ‘quite in Agnes’s position.’ For what sort did he intend it, then? For the class of children whose fathers keep carriages, and whose mothers dress their girls by the Paris modes, at three years old? Very good; then, in families which keep carriages and footmen, the children are supposed to think a book is a prize, which costs a penny? Be that also so, in the Republican cheap world; but might not the cheapeners print, when they are about it, prize poetry for their penny? Here is the ‘Christmas Carol,’ set to music, accompanying this moral story of the Snow.