But Mott's mother took care that before the day was over Mott should "under'tand" something of where and how he had been in fault; that there are sometimes ways of doing right which turn it into "wrong;" and that want of pity and tenderness for the wrong doer never, never can be right.
CHAPTER VII.
A LONG AGO STORY.
"You may laugh, my little people,
But be sure my story's true;
For I vow by yon church steeple,
I was once a child like you."
The Land of Long Ago.
If any of you children have travelled much, have you noticed that on a long journey there seem to come points, turns—I hardly know what to call them—after which the journey seems to go on differently. More quickly, perhaps more cheerfully, or possibly less so, but certainly differently. Looking back afterwards you see it was so—"from the time we all looked out of the window at the ruined abbey we seemed to get on so much faster," you would say, or—"after the steamer had passed the Spearhead Point, we began to feel dull and tired, and there was no more sunshine."
I think it is so in life. Suddenly, often quite unknowingly, we turn a corner sometimes of our history, sometimes of our characters, and looking back, long afterwards, we make a date of that point. It was so just now with my little Carrots. This trouble of his about the half-sovereign changed him. I do not mean to say that it saddened him and made him less happy than he had been—at his age, thank God, few, if any children have it in them to be so deeply affected—but it changed him. It was his first peep out into life, and it gave him his first real thoughts about things. It made him see how a little wrong-doing may cause great sorrow; it gave him his first vague, misty glimpse of that, to my thinking, saddest of all sad things—the way in which it is possible for our very nearest and dearest to mistake and misunderstand us.
He had been in some ways a good deal of a baby for his age, there is no doubt. He had a queer, baby-like way of not seeming to take in quickly what was said to him, and staring up in your face with his great oxen-like eyes, that did a little excuse Maurice's way of laughing at him and telling him he was "half-witted." But no one that really looked at those honest, sensible, tender eyes could for an instant have thought there was any "want" in their owner. It was all there—the root of all goodness, cleverness, and manliness—just as in the acorn there is the oak; but of course it had a great deal of growing before it, and, more than mere growing, it would need all the care and watchful tenderness and wise directing that could be given it, just as the acorn needs all the rain and sunshine and good nourishing soil it can get, to become a fine oak, straight and strong and beautiful. For what do I mean by "it," children? I mean the "own self" of Carrots, the wonderful "something" in the little childish frame which the wisest of all the wise men of either long ago or now-a-days have never yet been able to describe—the "soul," children, which is in you all, which may grow into so beautiful, so lovely and perfect a thing; which may, alas! be twisted and stunted and starved out of all likeness to the "image" in which it was created.
Do you understand a little why it seems sometimes such a very, very solemn thing to have the charge of children? When one thinks what they should be, and again when one thinks what they may be, is it not a solemn, almost too solemn a thought? Only we, who feel this so deeply, take heart when we remember that the Great Gardener who never makes mistakes has promised to help us; even out of our mistakes to bring good.
As I have said, the affair of the lost half-sovereign did not leave any lastingly painful impression on Carrots, but for some days he seemed unusually quiet and pale and a little sad. He had caught cold, too, with falling asleep on the dressing-room floor, nurse said, for the weather was still exceedingly chilly, though the spring was coming on. So altogether he was rather a miserable looking little Carrots.