and make them grow without
any choice or will of theirs; but with you, children, it is quite
otherwise. God has given you _wills_; and it is in your own power to
choose whether you will be good and happy children, and a blessing to
all around you, and turning everything around you into a blessing,
every year growing wiser and better; or whether you will yield to the
evil within and around you, and turn health, and time, and Christian
teaching, and all the good things God sends to feed your souls, into
food for your selfish and idle natures, and so grow every year worse
and worse. You must do one of these two things,--you may do the best.
Remember I do not say you can do them _for_ or _by yourselves_, but
you _can do_ them. God has said so. The flowers cannot choose or ask
for food, and so God chooses for them and gives without asking. You
are higher creatures than they, and can choose and ask, and so God
will wait for you to ask before he gives; but he is only waiting for
this, and he is always ready to hear.

Mrs. Mordaunt had told the children something of this last Sunday, and
Amy thought of it as she walked, and did ask God to bless her
teacher's words to her that day.

Now you have seen how Amy and Kitty Harrison used their power of
choice. The sun had beamed into the room for Kitty as well as for Amy
that morning. God had given them both the pleasant morning hours of
his day to use as they liked best. Kitty had chosen to spend them in
dozing lazily in bed, while Amy had jumped out of bed and dressed
quickly, and gone out to her favourite seat under an old cherry tree
to learn her lessons.

So the little girls reached the gate at the end of the wood. Outside
was a road, across which lay the corn-fields leading to the church,
and beside it stood a cottage where Amy and Kitty used to stop to call
for little Jane Hutton, one of their school-fellows. Jane's father was
a blacksmith; and the Huttons were richer than the Harrisons, so that
Jane had gayer bonnets and smarter dresses than Kitty and Amy. This
morning she had such beautiful new ribbons that Kitty's attention was
quite caught by them. And Jane too was not a little proud of them; her
mother had given a shilling a yard for them at the next town. If
Kitty had found it difficult to learn her lessons before, she now
found it quite impossible; for in the midst of every line she could
not help reckoning how many weeks' halfpence it would take, and how
many times