I do not think I am ever likely to be so loved and feared by those I live with as to have my ill-humours made into laws.  I hope not.  But I am sometimes thankful, on the other hand, that GOD is more forbearing with us than we commonly are with each other, and does not lead us into temptation when we are at our worst and weakest.

Any one who has a bad temper must sometimes look back at the years before he learned self-control, and feel thankful that he is not a murderer, or burdened for life by the weight on his conscience of some calamity of which he was the cause.  If the knife which furious Fred threw at his sister before he was out of petticoats had hit the child’s eye instead of her forehead, could he ever have looked into the blinded face without a pang?  If the blow with which impatient Annie flattered herself she was correcting her younger brother had thrown the naughty little lad out of the boat instead of into the sailor’s arms, and he had been drowned—­at ten years old a murderess, how could she endure for life the weight of her unavailing remorse?

I very nearly killed Philip once.  It makes me shudder to think of it, and I often wonder I ever could lose my temper again.

We were eight years old, and out in the garden together.  We had settled to build a moss-house for my dolls, and had borrowed the hatchet out of the wood-house, without leave, to chop the stakes with.  It was entirely my idea, and I had collected all the moss and most of the sticks.  It was I, too, who had taken the hatchet.  Philip had been very tiresome about not helping me in the hard part; but when I had driven in the sticks by leaning on them with all my weight, and had put in bits of brushwood where the moss fell out and Philip laughed at me, and, in short, when the moss-house was beginning to look quite real, Philip was very anxious to work at it, and wanted the hatchet.

“You wouldn’t help me over the hard work,” said I, “so I shan’t give it you now; I’ll make my moss-house myself.”

“No, you won’t,” said Philip.

“Yes, I shall,” said I.

“No, you won’t,” he reiterated; “for I shall pull it down as fast as you build it.”

“You’d better not,” I threatened.

Just then we were called in to dinner.  I hid the hatchet, and Philip said no more; but he got out before me, and when I returned to work I found that the moss-house walls, which had cost me so much labour, were pulled to pieces and scattered about the shrubbery.  Philip was not to be seen.

My heart had been so set upon my project that at first I could only feel the overwhelming disappointment.  I was not a child who often cried, but I burst into tears.

I was sobbing my hardest when Philip sprang upon me in triumph, and laughing at my distress.

“I kept my promise,” said he, tossing his head, “and I’ll go on doing it.”

I am sure those shocks of fury which seize one like a fit must be a devil possessing one.  In an instant my eyes were as dry as the desert in a hot wind, and my head reeling with passion.  I ran to the hatchet, and came back brandishing it.