"I wouldn't care," said the little girl, "if it had been yesterday's money, but it was the first, the very first I ever earned of myself, and I meant to save it always!"
"I think I can tell you exactly how it happened, my child. Just look at the untidy appearance of your drawer. There are scraps in it of a great many things that ought not to be there. Here is a broken slate, your worn-out work-basket, your summer sun-bonnet, empty bottles, spools of cotton, and last but not least, about a quart of hickory nuts,—a nice array, I am sure."
Bessie hung her head. She was ashamed to have her disorderly ways remarked. A want of neatness was her greatest fault.
"I was just going to clear it up to-morrow," she murmured, twitching rather uneasily at her apron strings.
"Oh, my little girl, that 'just going' of yours is one of the saddest things I can hear you say. You are always 'just going,' and yet the time seldom comes that you do as you intend. You are full of good intentions that you are either too lazy or too thoughtless ever to fulfil. If I did not watch over you very sharply, every thing you have would be like this miserable looking drawer, a complete mass of disorder."
"Oh, I hope not!" cried Bessie, quite appalled at the news.
"Now," continued her mother, "I can trace the losing of your money back to your want of neatness. In all probability, when you came to this drawer some time to get a few of your hickory nuts, you have caught up the Madeira among the others, carried it down stairs, and left the whole pile lying as you often do, somewhere around the garden till you feel in the humor for cracking them. I want to know, in the first place, why your hickory nuts were ever put in this drawer among your books and spools of cotton."
Bessie had been growing warmer and warmer while her mother was speaking, until it seemed to her as though the tips of her ears were on fire. Conviction forced itself upon her mind that her Madeira nut must have gone in the way her mother described, for she remembered distinctly having often taken two or three handfuls of nuts and carried them in her apron down to the garden, leaving them lying carelessly about her favorite resorts, under the old apple-tree for instance, or on the big flat stone by the brook. She had many just such idle, unsystematic ways of managing. She felt she was in the wrong, so she scarcely knew how to defend herself.
"I don't know why I put the nuts there, mother," she said, "unless it was to get them out of the way. They are those that are left of the basket full I found in the woods by Mr. Dart's farm, one day when Nelly and I went there together."
"When will you learn neatness, Bessie?"