Commandment, and felt it looking me full in the face.

I suppose I was five or six years old. I had begun to be trusted
with errands; one of them was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of
milk every morning, to purchase which I went always to the money-
drawer in the shop and took out four cents. We were allowed to
take a "small brown" biscuit, or a date, or a fig, or a "gibral-
tar," sometimes; but we well understood that we could not help
ourselves to money.

Now there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop-window
down town, which I had seen and set my heart upon. I had learned
that its price was two cents; and one morning as I passed around
the counter with my tin pail I made up my mind to possess myself
of that amount. My father's back was turned; he was busy at his
desk with account-books and ledgers. I counted out four cents
aloud, but took six, and started on my errand with a fascinating
picture before me of that pink and green horseback rider as my
very own.

I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him. I knew that his
paint was poisonous, and I could not have intended to eat him;
there were much better candies in my father's window; he would
not sell these dangerous painted toys to children. But the little
man was pretty to look at, and I wanted him, and meant to have
him. It was just a child's first temptation to get possession of
what was not her own,--the same ugly temptation that produces the
defaulter, the burglar, and the highway robber, and that made it
necessary to declare to every human being the law, "Thou shalt
not covet."