TELLING MOTHER
A group of young girls stood about the door of the schoolroom one afternoon, whispering together, when a little girl joined them, and asked what they were doing.
"I am telling the girls a secret, Kate, and we will let you know, if you will promise not to tell any one as long as you live," was the reply.
"I won't tell any one but my mother," replied Kate. "I tell her everything, for she is my best friend."
"No, not even your mother, no one in the world."
"Well, then I can't hear it; for what I can't tell mother, is not fit for me to know."
After speaking these words, Kate walked away slowly, and perhaps sadly, yet with a quiet conscience, while her companions went on with their secret conversation.
I am sure that if Kate continued to act on that principle, she became a virtuous, useful woman. No child of a Christian mother will be likely to take a sinful course, if Kate's reply is taken for a rule of conduct.
As soon as a boy listens to conversations at school or on the playground, which he would fear or blush to repeat to his mother, he is in the way of temptation, and no one can tell where he will stop. Many a man dying in disgrace, in prison, or on the scaffold, has looked back with bitter remorse to the time when he first listened to a sinful companion who came between him and a pious mother.