24. If you are in a place of work, be obedient to your employer. Those make the best masters and mistresses who have been the most obedient servants; for the discharge of one duty disposes us to perform another.
25. The best way to qualify yourselves to act well when grown up, is to act well while you are children.
LESSON XXXIX.
Obstinacy.—Lessons without Books.
1. There is a certain fault which almost all children have in a greater or less degree. It is called by different names; sometimes it is termed wilfulness, sometimes pertinacity, and sometimes it receives the still harsher name of obstinacy.
2. Almost all our faults are owing to the perversion or abuse of propensities originally good; and perseverance, when carried too far, or expended upon unworthy objects, becomes a troublesome infirmity.
3. Louisa and Emily had both something of this infirmity, but differing both in degree and in its mode of operation.
4. What are called little things did not trouble Emily at all; and, on the contrary, they troubled Louisa very much.
5. But, when anything did seem peculiarly desirable to Emily,—when she set her heart upon having her own way,—she carried her perseverance to a degree which deserved to be called obstinacy.