Oh, what a condition for a child to go to sleep in!  Euphrosyne was greatly annoyed.  “They are not correcting her evil dispositions,” cried she.  “I do not allow that this has anything to do necessarily with being very rich.”

Ah, good Fairies, you do not know “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of Heaven.”

Look now at that young face, asleep on a downy pillow, in a bed richly hung with crimson drapery, in a room filled with luxuries, glowing with warmth and comfort.  You are shocked that the heart within should be disturbed by nasty little envyings, that made the good things she possessed of no value to her.  ’Tis well; but remember we are all rich by comparison.  Go to the poor frost-bitten wayside beggar-child, my little readers; bring him into your comfortable drawing-room, which you sit in every day and think nothing about, and he will fancy he has got into Paradise.  It is a luxurious palace to him.  Take him to your snug bed and let him sleep there, and it will be to him what a state apartment in Windsor Castle would be to you.  Do not then let you and me scold too much at Julia, but let us keep on the watch to drive away from ourselves the discontented grumbling thoughts that are apt to make us all ungrateful to God.  Julia did not sleep well.  The fillagree box was a fort of night-mare to her.  She dreamt of its growing up into a great giant, and thumping her on the head, and calling out that she ought to be ashamed of herself.  Do you know, I think this dream was owing to her Godmother, Euphrosyne, for she lingered behind the other Fairies as they vanished, and shook, not waved, her wand over the sleeping child, with a very angry face.

In the morning Julia, like Aurora, awoke in a temporary forgetfulness of her troubles.  The morning air is so refreshing and sleep does one so much good, and the sun shining through the windows looks so gay, and all things speak of hope so loudly in a morning, who can be sullen?  Certainly not little girls full of life and expectation.  But the thought of the fillagree box by degrees took possession of her mind and rankled there as before.  She too had a Governess, and many lessons to learn and much to do, and she did them; but neither English history nor French fairy tales could quite drive away the fillagree box.  Indeed it introduced its horrid face before her into the midst of a multiplication sum, and Mademoiselle thought she was bewitched to have grown so stupid over her arithmetic all at once.  She spent a half hour over that one sum, and when it was done she was so much tired she gave up lessons for the day.  Besides, she had to prepare for her friends.  She went into her boudoir, opened her cabinets and unfolded her treasures of various sorts—­oh I can’t tell you what beautiful things! besides interesting collections of foreign and English shells, and stuffed humming birds, which you and I should be charmed to possess.  And Julia was in general