All impatience had vanished from the boy's face.
"There was a man who had to go upon a journey; the stage-coach was to call for him at sun-rise. More than an hour before it was time for the sun to be up, the man was all ready to go, and for the whole of that hour he walked the floor impatiently, grumbling at the sun because he did not rise. 'I'm all ready, and I want to be going,' he said. 'It's time the sun was up, long ago.' Don't you think he was a very foolish man?"
Clarence laughed, and said he thought the man was very foolish indeed.
"Do you think he was more foolish than you were just now for grumbling because dinner wasn't ready?"
Clarence laughed again, and said he did not know. Just then Hannah, the cook, brought in the waiter with the children's dinner upon it. Clarence sprang for a chair, and drew it hastily and noisily to the table.
"Try and see if you can't do that more orderly, my dear," his mother said, in a quiet voice, looking at him, as she spoke, with a steady eye.
The boy removed his chair, and then replaced it gently.
"That is much better, my son."
And thus she corrected his disorderly habits, quieted his impatient temper, and checked his rudeness, without showing any disturbance. This she had to do daily. At almost every meal she found it necessary to repress his rude impatience. It was line upon line, and precept upon precept. But she never tired, and rarely permitted herself to show that she was disturbed, no matter how deeply grieved she was at times over the wild and reckless spirit of her boy.
On the next day she was not very well; her head ached badly all the morning. Hearing the children in the passage when they came in from school at noon, she was, rising from the bed where she had lain down, to attend to them and give them their dinners, when Aunt Mary said—"Don't get up, Anna, I will see to the children."