At last a rather husky voice spoke:—
“You can’t expect people to like what is so very sad, even if it is—what you call—right—and all that.”
“No! neither does God expect it!” was Aunt Judy’s earnest reply. “We are allowed to be sorry when trials come, for we feel the suffering, and cannot at present understand the blessing or necessity of it. But we are not allowed to ‘sorrow without hope;’ and we are not allowed, even when we are most sorry, to be rebellious, and fancy we could choose better for ourselves than God chooses for us.”
Aunt Judy’s lesson, as well as story, was ended now, and she began talking over the entertaining part of the Tod history, and then went on to other things, till No. 6 was quite herself again, and wanted to know how much was true about the motherless little girls; and when she found from Aunt Judy’s answer that the account was by no means altogether an invention, she went into a fever-fidget to know who the children were, and what had become of them; and finally settled that the one thing in the world she most wished for, was to see them.
Nor would she be persuaded that this was a foolish idea, until Aunt Judy asked her how she would like to be introduced to a couple of very old women, with huge hooked noses, and beardy, nut-cracker chins, and be told that those were the motherless little girls who had broken their hearts over rabbits’ tails!—an inquiry which tickled No. 6’s fancy immensely, so that she began to laugh, and suggest a few additions of her own to the comical picture, in the course of doing which, she fortunately quite lost sight of the “one thing” which a few minutes before she had “most wished for in the world!”
“OUT OF THE WAY”
“Oh wonderful Son that can so astonish a Mother!”
Hamlet.
“What a horrid nuisance you are, No. 8, brushing everything down as you go by! Why can’t you keep out of the way?”
“Oh, you mustn’t come here, No. 8. Aunt Judy, look! he’s sitting on my doll’s best cloak. Do tell him to go away.”
“I can’t have you bothering me, No. 8; don’t you see how busy I am, packing? Get away somewhere else.”