baby. Muffled and rosy and frost-bitten, the tears
of cold rolling unnoticed down her plump cheeks, she ran after my busy
mother all day long, or tumbled about behind the counter, or nestled
for a nap among the bulging sacks of oats and barley. She warmed her
little hands over my mother's pot of glowing charcoal--there was no
stove in the store--and even learned to stand astride of it, for
further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire.

Fetchke was like a young colt inseparable from the mare. I make this
comparison not in disrespectful jest, but in deepest pity. Fetchke
kept close to my mother at first for love and protection, but the
petting she got became a blind for discipline. She learned early, from
my mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for
labor. She learned to bow to the yoke, to lift burdens, to do more for
others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn. She
learned to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share.
When she was only fit to nurse her dolls, she learned how to comfort a
weary heart.

And all this while I sat warm and watched over at home, untouched by
any discipline save such as I directly incurred by my own sins. I
differed from Fetchke a little in age, considerably in health, and
enormously in luck. It was my good luck, in the first place, to be
born after her, instead of before; in the second place, to inherit,
from the family stock, that particular assortment of gifts which was
sure to mark me for special attentions, exemptions, and privileges;
and as fortune always smiles on good fortune, it has ever been my
luck, in the third place, to find something good in my idle
hand--whether a sunbeam, or a loving heart, or a congenial
task--whenever, on turning a corner, I put out my hand to see what my
new world was like; while my sister, dear, devoted creature, had her
hands so full of work that the sunbeam slipped, and the loving comrade
passed out of hearing before she could straighten from her task, and
all she had of the better world was a scented zephyr fanned in her
face by the irresistible closing of a door.

Perhaps Esau has been too severely blamed for selling his birthright
for a mess of pottage. The lot of the firstborn is not necessarily to
be envied. The firstborn of a well-to-do patriarch, like Isaac, or of
a Rothschild of to-day, inherits, with his father's flocks and slaves
and coffers, a troop of cares and responsibilities; u