"'No,' said his mother, 'I beg you will divide it quite exactly.'"
Frank gathered his fragments into five little mounds, and after carefully measuring their height, declared that they were equal.
"'They are of the same length and breadth, I acknowledge,' said the father, 'but they are not of the same thickness.'
"'Oh, thickness! I never thought of thickness.'
"'But you should have thought of it,' said his father."
At last Frank, seeing that there was no other way to satisfy the demands of distributive justice, went to the closet, and brought forth a pair of scales. "By patiently adding and taking away, he at last made them each of the same weight, and everybody was satisfied with the accuracy of the division."
This habit of accuracy, developed in the family meals, saved them from the temptation of wasting time in flippant conversation.
Miss Edgeworth's most striking plea for grown-up-edness versus childish curiosity was elaborated in her story of Frank and his orrery. Frank had read of an orrery in which the motions of the planets were shown by ingenious mechanism. Being a small boy, he naturally desired to make one.
For several days he almost forgot about his Roman History and Latin Grammar and the "Stream of Time," so absorbed was he in making his orrery. He had utilized his mother's tambour frame and knitting needles; and wires and thread held together his planets, which were made of worsted balls. It was a wonderful universe which Frank had created—as many great philosophers before him had created theirs—out of the inner consciousness. When it had been constructed to the best of his ability, the only question was, would his universe work,—would his planets go singing around the sun, or was there to be a crash of worlds? Frank knew no other way than to put it to the test of action, and he invited the family to witness the great experiment. He pointed out with solemn joy his worsted earth, moon, and planets, and predicted their revolutions according to his astronomy.