Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills. And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it; a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time; warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the carriage. Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly, whether the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world, if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes? Intended to produce, I say: what effect it does produce, I can easily ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it? Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’ Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one, and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses are to drive in carriages? That is their Utopia. Mine, so much abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.