‘I WISH, I wish, I wish,’ said a little boy, who awoke early one morning, and lay in bed thinking; ‘I wish I was grown up, so as to do some good. If I was governor, I’d make good laws; or I’d be a missionary; or I’d get rich, and give away so much to poor people; but I am only a little boy, and it will take me plenty of years to grow up.’ Was he going to put off doing good till then? ‘Well,’ he said to himself while he was dressing, ‘I know what I CAN do. I can be good; that’s left to little boys.’ Therefore, when he was dressed, he knelt and asked God to help him to be good, and try to serve Him all day with all his heart, and not FORGET.[57] Then he went down stairs to finish his lessons.

No sooner was he seated with his clean slate before him, than his mother called him to run into the wood-house for his little brother. He did not want to leave his lesson, yet he cheerfully said, ‘I’ll go, mother;’ and away he ran. And how do you think he found ‘bubby?’ With a sharp axe in his hand. ‘I chop,’ he said; and quite likely the next moment he would have chopped off his little toes. The little boy only thought of minding his mother; but who can tell if his ready obedience did not save his baby brother from being a cripple for life?

As he was going on an errand for his mother, he saw a poor woman whose foot had slipped on the newly-made ice, and she fell; and in falling she had spilled her bag of beans and basket of apples, and some wicked boys were snatching up her apples and running off with them. The little boy stopped and said, ‘Let me help you to pick up your beans and apples,’[58] and his nimble fingers quickly helped her out of her mishap. He only thought of being kind; he did not know how his kind act comforted the poor woman long after she got home, and how she prayed God to bless him.

At dinner, as his father and mother were talking, his father said roughly, ‘I shan’t do anyth............