A COZY NOOK WHEN EVENING COMES
When study hour comes, take up your books and go briskly to work, forgetting that there is anything else in the world, and you will be astonished how quickly you will learn your lessons. Besides, you will be learning one of the most valuable lessons in life—to do with your might whatever your hands, or minds, find to do.
GOOD NIGHT
I. GETTING READY FOR BED
By and by the clock strikes eight or nine, and your mother says, “Children, time to go to bed!”
Sometimes you will have just come to the interesting point in the story, and would give anything to go on and finish it. But often you will be just nodding over your book, or beginning to wonder why the story is not quite so interesting as it was, or why the lines seem to be running into one another, and the book inclined to swing up and bump your nose.
If you have had a lively, busy, happy day, you are quite sleepy enough to be ready for bed—that is, if you could drop into it with all your clothes on, without all the bother and fuss of undressing. So you pull yourself together bravely and answer, “All right, mother,” and say “Good night” to everybody, and upstairs you go.
Of course, you must take off your clothes, because you would find them most uncomfortable to sleep in. Besides, the little pores all over your skin have been pouring out perspiration all day long; and a great deal of this has been caught by your clothes, just as it is caught by the bedclothes while you sleep.