“One other word before you go.  I dare say you little ones think we grown-up people are quite independent, and can do just as we like.  But it is not so.  We have to learn to submit to the will of the great Keeper of Heaven and earth, without understanding it, just as Aunt Judy’s little Victims had to submit to their keepers without knowing why.  So thank Aunt Judy for her story, and let us all do our best to be obedient and contented.”

“When I am old enough, mother,” remarked No. 7, in his peculiarly mild and deliberate way of speaking, and smiling all the time, “I think I shall put Aunt Judy into a story.  Don’t you think she would make a capital Ogre’s wife, like the one in ’Jack and the Bean-Stalk,’ who told Jack how to behave, and gave him good advice?”

It was a difficult question to say “No” to, so mamma kissed No. 7, instead of answering him, and No. 7 smiled himself away, with his head full of the bright idea.

VEGETABLES OUT OF PLACE.

“But any man that walks the mead,
   In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead,
   A meaning suited to his mind.” 
Tennyson.

It was a fine May morning.  Not one of those with an east wind and a bright sun, which keep people in a puzzle all as day to whether it is hot or cold, and cause endless nursery disputes about the keeping on of comforters and warm coats, whenever a hoop-race, or some such active exertion, has brought a universal puggyness over the juvenile frame—­but it was a really mild, sweet-scented day, when it is quite a treat to be out of doors, whether in the gardens, the lanes, or the fields, and when nothing but a holland jacket is thought necessary by even the most tiresomely careful of mammas.

It was not a day which anybody would have chosen to be poorly upon; but people have no choice in such matters, and poor little No. 7, of our old friends “the little ones,” was in bed ill of the measles.

The wise old Bishop, Jeremy Taylor, told us long ago, how well children generally bear sickness.  “They bear it,” he says, “by a direct sufferance;” that is to say, they submit to just what discomfort exists at the moment, without fidgetting about either a cause or a consequence,” and decidedly without fretting about what is to come.

For a grown-up person to attain to the same state of unanxious resignation, is one of the high triumphs of Christian faith.  It is that “delivering one’s self up,” of which the poor speak so forcibly on their sick-beds.

No. 7 proved a charming instance of the truth of Jeremy Taylor’s remark.  He behaved in the most composed manner over his feelings, and even over his physic.

During the first day or two, when he sat shivering by the fire, reading “Neill D’Arcy’s Life at Sea,” and was asked how he felt, he answered with his usual smile; “Oh, all right; only a little cold now and then.”  And afterwards, when he was in bed in a darkened room, and the same question was put, he replied almost as quietly, (though without the smile,) “Oh—­only a little too hot.”