INTRODUCTION.
It has been several years since Aunt Kitty last presented herself to her young friends, yet she hopes that she has not been forgotten by them, and that her reappearance will give them pleasure. She introduces to them in the present volume no new acquaintance, but she offers to them, in one group, all who formerly interested them. Blind Alice and her young benefactress—Jessie Graham and her ardent, generous, but inconsiderate friend, Florence Arnott—Grace and Clara—and Ellen Leslie, will here be found together. They have been carefully prepared for this second presentation to the public by Aunt Kitty's own hand. It is hoped that her efforts for their improvement have not been wholly unsuccessful, and that they will be found not altogether unworthy teachers of those lessons of benevolence and truth, generosity, justice and self-government, which she designed to convey through them.
New York, Feb. 15th, 1847.
BLIND ALICE.
Good morning, my young friend! A merry Christmas, or happy New Year, or at least a pleasant holiday to you;—for holiday I hope it is, as it is on such festivals, when there is no danger of lessons being forgotten, that I best love to see around me a group of happy children, all the happier for having Aunt Kitty to direct their plays—to show them the pleasantest walks, or, when they are tired both of playing and walking, to sit with them by the fireside and tell them some entertaining story. I am never however entirely without such young companions. I have always with me an orphan niece—Harriet Armand—who is about ten years old. Her father and mother died when she was quite an infant, and she has ever since been to me as my own child. Then I have another niece—Mary Mackay—just six years old, the merriest little girl on whom the sun ever shone, who, as her father lives quite near me, spends part—her mother says the largest part—of every day with me. Besides these, there are Susan May and Lucy Ellis, who, living in a neat, pretty village near us, seldom let a fine day pass without seeing Harriet and me.
I am the very intimate and confidential friend of all these little girls. To me they intrust all their secrets. I know all the pleasant surprises they intend for each other; am consulted on birth-day presents, and have helped them out of many troubles, which, though they might seem little to larger people, were to them very serious affairs. I encourage them to tell me, not only what they say and do, but what they think and feel. Sometimes when they are a little fretful and discontented because their friends have not done just as they wished, we talk the matter over together, and find that they have themselves been unreasonable, and then the fretfulness is dismissed, and they try by a very pleasant manner to make amends for their hard thoughts and unjust feelings. If any one has really injured them, or been unkind to them, and I find them too angry easily to forgive it, I bid them put on their bonnets, and we go out together to look for their good-humor. Then, as we see the gay flowers, and inhale the sweet perfumes, and listen to the merry birds that hop around us, twittering and chirping, my little friends forget to be angry; and while I talk to them of the good Father in heaven, who made all these beautiful and pleasant things for his children on earth, they feel such love and thankfulness to him, that it seems easy for his sake even to forgive those who have done them wrong. These are Aunt Kitty's lessons,—they are lessons for the heart, and such as I hope all my readers will be pleased to learn.
The walk which these little girls and I best love is to a small house, about half a mile from mine. Small as it is, it looks so pleasantly with its white walls, (it is freshly whitewashed every spring,) and green shutters, its neat paling and pretty flower-garden, peeping from the midst of green trees, that any one might be contented to live there. In this house lives a widow, with one only child, a daughter, a year older than my niece Harriet. I will tell you their story, which I think will make you feel almost as much interested in them as we do, and you will then understand why we like them so well, and visit them so often.
About three years ago, my little friends, Susan May and Lucy Ellis, began to talk a great deal of a child who had lately come to the school in the village, which they attended. They said her name was Alice Scott; that her teachers thought a great deal of her because she learned her lessons so well, and that her schoolmates loved her because she was so good-humored and merry. She had told them that she used to live a great way off, and that her father and mother had left her other home because it was sickly, and had come here because they had heard it was a healthy place. The girls said Alice looked very well herself, but that Mrs. Scott was pale, and that Alice said she was often sick. "A stranger and sick," thought I, "then I must go to see her"—and so I did, very soon.
I found her a pleasing, as well as a good woman, though she seemed sad, except when Alice was with her, and then she was happy and cheerful enough. She told me that her husband was a carpenter, and as he was an industrious and honest man, he had as much work given to him as he could do, and would have made money enough for them to live on very comfortably, had he not been so often ill himself, and obliged to pay so much to the doctors who attended his family when they were ill. This made them very poor, but it was not being poor, she said, that made her look and feel sorrowful,—it was the thought of three sweet little babies, all younger than Alice, who had died and been buried side by side in the green churchyard of the place from which they had moved. Then she would check herself, and say how very wrong it was for her to grieve so much, when God had still left her dear Alice with her, and she knew her babies were all happy in heaven.