the good resolution he had made, and went away.

As he was returning home very sorrowful, he could not help thinking how
happy he had expected to be that evening; and he regretted extremely
that his grandmother would have no cloak to keep her warm in the cold
weather. Still, the recollection that he had patiently borne the blow
and insulting speeches of Tom, and thus endeavoured to put in practice
the good precepts he had been taught, consoled him, and made him feel
less sad than he would otherwise have been.

"How did you get that black eye, Ned?" asked his grandmother, as soon as
she saw him. "I hope you have not been fighting."

"No, grandmother, indeed I have not," replied Ned; and he told her how
it had happened.

His grandmother said that he was a good boy to have acted as he did, and
added, "It makes me happier to find that you behave well, than twenty
new cloaks would."

The next day, at dinner time, when Ned went into the little outhouse
where he and Tom usually ate this meal, he found Tom sitting there
crying.

"What makes you cry, Tom?" inquired Ned.

"Because I have no dinner," was the reply.

"How happens that?" asked Ned.

"Because, now father's out of work, mother says she can only give us two
meals a-day. I only had a little bit of bread this morning; and I shall
have nothing else till I go home in the evening, and then she will give
me a cold potato or two."

Ned's grandmother had given him that day for his dinner a large slice of
bread, and a piece of cold bacon. Ned had been working hard, and was
very hungry. He could have eaten all the bread and bacon with pleasure,
and felt certain that if he had got no dinner and Tom had, Tom would not
have given him any of his. He recollected that Tom had never in his life
shown him any kindness; that, a fortnight ago, when Tom had had four
apples given him, he had eaten them all himself, without even offering
him part of one; and, above all, he called to mind that Tom was in all
probability the person who had robbed him of his apricots, and killed
his favourite apricot-tree.

But he remembered our Saviour's command, "Do good to them that hate
you;" and though Tom was a bad boy, yet it grieved Ned to see him crying
with hunger, whilst he himself had food to eat. So he divided both the
bread and the bacon into two equal shares, with his knife, and then,
going up to Tom, gave him one portion, and desired him to eat it. Tom
looked at Ned in some surpri