Scarcely had Rollo sat down when Miss Muffet saw a little girl whose face was very familiar.
"You are Rosamond, aren't you? And once you bought a beautiful purple jar instead of shoes, even though your old shoes had holes in them?"
"It was a youthful indiscretion," said Rosamond, "and I have learned a lesson from it."
"It was just lovely. Any one can have shoes, but a purple jar is something one dreams about: it's almost as good as having a party."
Then she looked very anxiously at Rosamond and said,—
"I hope it didn't happen to you? Since first I read the story Miss Edgeworth told about you and the purple jar, I couldn't get out of my head the dreadful lines with which she begins,—
'O teach her while your lessons last
To judge the future by the past,
The mind to strengthen and anneal
While on the stithy glows the steel.'
It seemed such a dreadful thing to have your mind annealed, and you so little. I'm sure it's something uncomfortable. And then how hard it was for your mamma to make you choose to do all the unpleasant things. I don't mind doing them when I'm told to, but to have to choose them rumples up my mind. That must have been an awful time when you had to choose a needle-book instead of that funny stone plum that you could have fooled the boys with."
"But Mamma wanted to train me to be a Free Moral Agent," said Rosamond.
"I don't like agents," said Miss Muffet, and then she was sorry that she had been so rude. "I mean I don't believe in being one till one is more grown up. And now that we are talking about it, maybe you could tell me what the other line means,—