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 she would have to open the gate for travellers who came to see the waterfall near the cottage, before she could buy a ribbon like that. CHAPTER II. AT SCHOOL. At length the children reached the school before the hymn was learned, and Kitty felt very much ashamed when, after stammering through three verses, Mrs. Mordaunt gave her back the book, saying, "I would rather have no lesson from you, Kitty, than one learned so carelessly as this." However, it was too late to repair the fault, so Kitty resolved to give her very best attention to the chapter they were going to read. It was the parable of the sower and the seed, in the thirteenth of St. Matthew. I cannot tell you all that Mrs. Mordaunt said about it, but it was something of this kind:--