ou do; but now I don't think it would
be possible for me to take any pleasure in teasing Caleb, or you, or
David.

"I hope," added Madam Rachel, "that God will give you a benevolent and
tender heart, so that there shall be no _tendency_ in you to do wrong.
He will change yours, if you pray to him to do it. In fact, I hope, and
sometimes I almost believe, that he has begun. I do not think you would
have gone to Caleb to-day so pleasantly, and acknowledged your fault, as
you did by your actions, and felt so totally different from what you had
done, if God had not wrought some change in you. I have very often
talked with children about such faults, as plainly and kindly as I did
with you, and it produced no effect. When they went away, I found, by
their looks and actions afterwards, that their hearts were not changed
at all. And so, Dwight," said she, "I have not been saying this to
discourage you, but to make you feel that you need a greater change than
you can accomplish, and so to lead you to God that you may throw
yourself upon him, and ask him, not merely to help you in your
determinations not to act out your bad feelings, but to change the very
nature of them, or rather, to carry on the change, which I hope he has
begun."

Dwight remembered, while his mother was talking, how full his heart had
been of kindness and love to Caleb, while he was helping him that
afternoon, and he perceived clearly that he had not produced that state
of mind by any of his own determinations that he would feel so before he
actually did. He remembered how happy he had been at that time, and how
discontented and miserable after he had been troubling Caleb; and he had
a feeling of strong desire that God would change his heart, and make him
altogether and always benevolent and kind.

Now, it happened that Caleb had not understood this conversation very
well, and he began to be weary and uneasy. Besides just about this time
he began to recollect something about his grandmother's beginning a
story for him, when she took him up in her lap, after he came in from
the mole. So, when he noticed that there was a pause in the
conversation, he said,

"Grandmother, you promised to tell me a story about blind Samuel."

"So I did," said his grandmother smiling, "and I began it; but before I
got through you got fast asleep."

David and Dwight laughed, and so in fact did Caleb; and Madam Rachel
then said that if he would tell David and Dwight the stor