"But how many little girls are there, Mary, do you think, who, if they had never studied books or been directed by such sensible teachers as Mrs. Graham herself, would look at the stars, and the flowers, and the birds, and learn from them all which they can teach? Unless we see something more in these than their bright light, their pretty colors, or their gay plumage, they will teach us little, and it is generally from books or from some person who has had what Mrs. Graham calls book-learning, that we learn to look deeper."
"How did Mrs. Graham come to know so much about them then, Aunt Kitty, for I do not think she reads many books?"
"Mrs. Graham, my dear Mary, has been accustomed to associate with people much better educated than herself, and as she is a very observing and thoughtful person, she has lost no opportunity of learning. And now, Mary, you see that book-learning is of more use than you ever before thought it, for the person who has it, may help to open the eyes of many who have it not, to read what God has written for us all in the heavens and the earth."
CHAPTER II.
THE SCHOOL.
The next morning before Harriet and I had breakfasted, Mary came running in, her cheeks glowing and eyes sparkling with pleasure, crying out even before she had said good-morning, "Aunt Kitty, Jessie is to go to school with me and study lessons,—she is to begin to-day, and I am going to tell her to get ready at once, so I have not a minute to stay."
"Stop, stop, my dear," said I, seizing her hand as she was passing me, "just catch your breath and then tell us how all this was arranged."
"Oh, I told Miss Bennett how much Jessie wanted to go to school, and she said she might come if my father had not any objection, and I asked my father, and he said he had not any,—but I must go, Aunt Kitty, indeed I must," and breaking away from me, she bounded off.
She soon came back bringing the smiling Jessie with her, and from that day Jessie might be seen every morning about nine o'clock going to her school. She spent only two hours there each day, but as she really wished to learn, she improved very much, and Miss Bennett said, she repaid her for all trouble in teaching her, by her good example to our good-humored but wild little Mary. Jessie seemed to think she could never say or do enough to thank Mary for inducing Miss Bennett to give her lessons, and though Mary loved Jessie, and would never let any one find the least fault with her without a warm defence, I sometimes feared that Jessie's perfect submission to her will in all things would do her harm—that she would become quite a little despot. But a circumstance which happened in their school a short time after Jessie's lessons with Miss Bennett began, taught us that there was one thing Jessie loved better even than she loved Mary. I will relate the circumstance, and you will find out what that one thing was.