“She kissed me, my dear.”
“She didn’t kiss you mother—she bit you.”
“No, my daughter, you mistake, she did not bite me, but she kissed me affectionately.”
“She did bite you, mother—I’m sure, I saw her, and she made you cry.”
“My daughter—why!”
“You said, mother, one day when we were at home, that grandmother would eat me up, but she tried to eat you.”
The grandmother, as already intimated, had kissed her daughter fondly—with a mother’s ardor. Augusta saw her lips impressed on the mother’s cheek, and the tears starting fast, and rolling down; and she mistook the kiss for a bite, and thought those tears of joy were tears of pain. The whole mystery now vanished. “She will love you so much as to eat you up,” misconstrued, had been for weeks and months a sort of death-note sounding in the child’s imagination. This story, however improbable it may seem, is literally true, and may show how careful of early impressions, a parent should be.
C. G.