ent always to the money-drawer in the
shop and took out four cents. We were allowed to take a "small brown"
biscuit, or a date, or a fig, or a "gibraltar," sometimes; but we well
understood that we could not help ourselves to money.

Now there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop-window down
town, which I had seen and set my heart upon. I had learned that its
price was two cents; and one morning as I passed around the counter
with my tin pail I made up my mind to possess myself of that amount. My
father's back was turned; he was busy at his desk with account-books
and ledgers. I counted out four cents aloud, but took six, and started
on my errand with a fascinating picture before me of that pink and
green horseback rider as my very own.

I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him. I knew that his paint was
poisonous, and I could not have intended to eat him; there were much
better candies in my father's window; he would not sell these dangerous
painted toys to children. But the little man was pretty to look at, and
I wanted him, and meant to have him. It was just a child's first
temptation to get possession of what was not her own,--the same ugly
temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and the highway
robber, and that made it necessary to declare to every human being the
law, "Thou shalt not covet."

As I left the shop, I was conscious of a certain pleasure in the
success of my attempt, as any thief might be; and I walked off very
fast, clattering the coppers in the tin pail.

When I was fairly through the bars that led into the farmer's field,
and nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies, and looked at
them as they lay in my palm.

Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning, but it seemed
to me as if the sky grew suddenly dark; and those two pennies began to
burn through my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red hot, to my very
soul. It was agony to hold them. I laid them down under a tuft of grass
in the footpath, and ran as if I had left a demon behind me. I did my
errand, and returning, I looked about in the grass for the two cents,
wondering whether they could make me feel so badly again. But my good
angel hid them from me; I never found them.

I was too much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I had
already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him in the
parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier child if I
bad confessed,