d with your other dollies, just as well; that's a
good little girl."

Probably, if Blue Eyes had gone on imploring, you would have laid your
worsteds down, and given her the dolly; for you love her dearly, and never
mean to make her unhappy. But neither you nor I were prepared for what
followed.

"You're a naughty, ugly, hateful mamma! You never let me do _any_ thing,
and I wish you were dead!" with such a burst of screaming and tears that
we were both frightened. You looked, as well you might, heart-broken at
such words from your only child. You took her away; and when you came
back, you cried, and said you had whipped her severely, and you did not
know what you should do with a child of such a frightful temper.

"Such an outburst as that, just because I told her, in the gentlest way
possible, that she could not have a plaything! It is terrible!"

Then I said some words to you, which you thought were unjust. I asked you
in what condition your own nerves would have been by ten o'clock that
morning if your husband (who had, in one view, a much better right to
thwart your harmless desires than you had to thwart your child's, since
you, in the full understanding of maturity, gave yourself into his hands)
had, instead of admiring your pretty white dress, told you to be more
prudent, and not put it on; had told you it would be nonsense to have
breakfast out on the piazza; and that he could not wait for you to walk to
the station with him. You said that the cases were not at all parallel;
and I replied hotly that that was very true, for those matters would have
been to you only the comparative trifles of one short day, and would have
made you only a little cross and uncomfortable; whereas to little Blue
Eyes they were the all-absorbing desires of the hour, which, to a child in
trouble, always looks as if it could never come to an end, and would never
be followed by any thing better.

Blue Eyes cried herself to sleep, and slept heavily till late in the
afternoon. When her father came home, you said that she must not have the
red balloon, because she had been such a naughty girl. I have wondered
many times since why she did not cry again, or look grieved when you said
that, and laid the balloon away. After eleven o'clock at night, I went to
look at her, and found her sobbing in her sleep, and tossing about. I
groaned as I thought, "This is only one day, and there are three hundred
and sixty-five in a year!" But I never reca