7.  After a while, having proved his good qualities by barking away a set of pilferers, who were making an attack on the great pear tree, he was admitted into the house, and became one of its most vigilant and valued inmates.  He could fetch or carry either by land or water; would pick up a thimble or a ball of cotton, if little Annie should happen to drop them; or take Harry’s dinner to school for him with perfect honesty.

8.  “Beg, Frisk, beg!” said Harry, and gave him, after long waiting, the expected morsel.  Frisk was satisfied, but Harry was not.  The little boy, though a good-humored fellow in the main, had turns of naughtiness, which were apt to last him all day, and this promised to prove one of his worst.  It was a holiday, and in the afternoon his cousins, Jane and William, were to come and see him and Annie; and the pears were to be gathered, and the children were to have a treat.

9.  Harry, in his impatience, thought the morning would never be over.  He played such pranks—­buffeting Frisk, cutting the curls off of Annie’s doll, and finally breaking his grandmother’s spectacles—­that before his visitors arrived, indeed, almost immediately after dinner, he contrived to be sent to bed in disgrace.

10.  Poor Harry! there he lay, rolling and kicking, while Jane, and William, and Annie were busy about the fine, mellow Windsor pears.  William was up in the tree, gathering and shaking; Annie and Jane catching them in their aprons, and picking them up from the ground; now piling them in baskets, and now eating the nicest and ripest; while Frisk was barking gayly among them, as if he were catching Windsor pears, too!

11.  Poor Harry!  He could hear all this glee and merriment through the open window as he lay in bed.  The storm of passion having subsided, there he lay weeping and disconsolate, a grievous sob bursting forth every now and then, as he heard the loud peals of childish laughter, and as he thought how he should have laughed, and how happy he should have been, had he not forfeited all this pleasure by his own bad conduct.

12.  He wondered if Annie would not be so good-natured as to bring him a pear.  All on a sudden, he heard a little foot on the stair, pitapat, and he thought she was coming.  Pitapat came the foot, nearer and nearer, and at last a small head peeped, half afraid, through the half-open door.

13.  But it was not Annie’s head; it was Frisk’s—­poor Frisk, whom Harry had been teasing and tormenting all the morning, and who came into the room wagging his tail, with a great pear in his mouth; and, jumping upon the bed, He laid it in the little boy’s hand.

14.  Is not Frisk a fine, grateful fellow? and does he not deserve a share of Harry’s breakfast, whether he begs for it or not?  And little Harry will remember from the events of this day that kindness, even though shown to a dog, will always be rewarded; and that ill nature and bad temper are connected with nothing but pain and disgrace.