of two poor, pretty
orphan girls, and had them trained up in accordance with his own ideas,
intending to make one of them his wife. Both grew to be fine women, but
to spoil the romance, fell in love with other men! so that he enjoyed
the pleasure of sedulously educating good wives for two worthy
tradesmen, and being left in the lurch himself. A second experiment
turned out yet worse, for it cost him his life: he had doubtless had
enough of girls, so he took another animal, which he thought might be
tamer and more tractable--a horse. He would not allow it to be broken in
the usual method, which he considered very cruel: he would talk to it,
caress it, make it his friend, win it by kindness. But unfortunately for
his experiment, the horse killed him, by a kick, I believe, before it
had succeeded."

"Poor Day! Uncle, you remind me of the cow that the man wanted to train
so as to consider eating a superfluity--she was coming on admirably, but
unfortunately for the full success of the experiment, she perversely
died, the very day her owner had reduced her to one straw."

"How very unlucky!"

"Aunt Lucy," said Alice, "when Ellen gave us the Queen's theorizing in
education, I could not help thinking of the old saw, 'Bachelors' wives
and old maids' bairns are always the best guided.' It's very easy to
manage _dream_ children; but when you come to real flesh and blood, it's
quite another matter. It does not appear to me that all this
systematizing and speculation does much good."

"Not a bit of it," cried George Wyndham. "We boys must be boys to the
end of the chapter; and I tell you, some of us are pretty tough
subjects! The only hope is that we may turn out not quite so horrid,
when we grow up."

"I once heard a plan proposed for getting rid of boys of your age,
brother George," said Cornelia.

"Much obliged; what was that?"

"To bury them at seven, and dig them out at seventeen; how do you like
it?"

"'Tis a bad plan. There would be nobody left in the world to run errands
for older sisters--it would never do."

"When little Rudolph was so fond of his vegetable friends," said Mary,
"and found them so good, so sweet, so much to his taste, I thought of an
account I had somewhere read, written, I think, by the witty Sydney
Smith, of a conversation a new missionary in the South Sea islands held
about his predecessor, who had been eaten by the cannibals. He asked the
natives if they had known him--we will call him Mr. B