seven years old. I have but to close my eyes, and I see all that
scene again, almost as plainly as ever. Six or seven children (I
am one of them) are sitting round a tea-table; their father and
mother are there too; and an old gentleman, who is (in his own
judgment) one of the wisest of men. I see the dining-room, large and
low-ceilinged; the cheerful glow of the autumnal fire; the little
faces in the soft candle-light, for glaring gas was there unknown.
There had been much talk about the sinfulness of waste--of the
waste of even very little things. The old gentleman, so wise (in
his own judgment, and indeed in my judgment at that period), was
instilling into the children's minds some of those lessons which
are often impressed upon children by people (I am now aware) of
no great wisdom or cleverness. He had dwelt at considerable length
upon the sinfulness of wasting anything; likewise on the sinfulness
of children being saucy or particular as to what they should eat.
He enforced, with no small solemnity, the duty of children's eating
what was set before them without minding whether it was good or not,
or at least without minding whether they liked it or not. The poor
little girl listened to all that was said, and of course received
it all as indubitably true. Waste and sauciness, she saw, were
wrong, so she judged that the very opposite of waste and sauciness
must be right. Accordingly, she thought she would turn to use
something that was very small, but still something that ought not
to be wasted. Accordingly, she thought she would show the docility
of her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable.
Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles
to which she had been listening. And while a boy, evidently destined
to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit
of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or
doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate