Had Emily’s mother told her that she looked at her watch when the little girl first went for the thimble, and that she had passed exactly three-quarters of an hour in idleness, she would not have credited it.

After a while Mrs. Manvers sent Emily up stairs to get something for her.  She stayed so long that her mother called, “Emily, what keeps you so?”

“Nothing, mamma; I stopped just a minute to look at my new sash, it is so pretty.”

Ten minutes more were added to the wasted time.  The next day Emily came home from school without any ticket for punctuality.

“How is this?” asked the mother; “you started from home in good time?”

“Yes, mother,” returned the little girl, “but I stopped just a minute to speak to Sarah Randall, and I know our school-clock must be wrong, for it was half-past nine by it when I went in.”

Mrs. Manvers took the trouble to walk around to the school and compare her watch with the clock; they agreed exactly, and thus she found her daughter had wasted half an hour that morning.

“Do you know your lessons, Emily?” she asked, after her return, as the little girl had been sitting for more than an hour with her books upon her lap.

“Not quite, mother.”

“Have you been studying all the time, my dear?”

“Pretty near; there was a man beating his horse dreadfully, and I just looked out of the window a minute.”

Mrs. Manvers smiled, and yet sighed, for she knew that Emily had spent half an hour humming a tune and gazing idly from the window upon the passers by.

TO BE CONTINUED.

* * * * *

Original.

A CHILD’S READING.

In this day of books, when so many pens are at work writing for children, and when so many combine instruction with entertainment, every family should be, to some extent, a reading family.  Books have become indispensable; they are a kind of daily food; and we take for granted that no parent who reads this Magazine neglects to provide aliment of this nature for his family.  How many leisure hours may thus be turned to profitable account!  How many useful ideas and salutary impressions may thus be gained which will never be lost!  If any family does not know the pleasure and the benefit of such employment of a leisure hour, we advise them to make the experiment forthwith.  The district library, the Sabbath-school or village library in almost every town afford the facilities necessary for the experiment.  But my object is not so much to induce any to form the taste for reading, for who, now a-days, does not read? nor is it to write a dissertation on the pleasures and advantages of reading; but simply to suggest a few plain hints upon the subject matter and the manner of reading.