Tales and Novels — Volume 01: Moral TalesEdgeworth, Maria
General
Tales and Novels — Volume 01: Moral Tales
Edgeworth, Maria
Fiction
willingly obeyed; but put the seeds very quickly out of his mouth, when
he found that they were not sweet. He then said "that he wished he
might have them, that he might sow them in the little garden behind his
mother's house, that they might be fit to eat some time or other."
Mad. de Rosier bought the radish-seeds, and ordered a little spade,
a hoe, and a watering-pot, to be sent home for him. Herbert's face
brightened with joy: he was surprised to find that any of his requests
were granted, because Grace had regularly reproved him for being
troublesome whenever he asked for any thing; hence he had learned to
have recourse to force or fraud to obtain his objects. He ventured now
to hold Mad. De Rosier by the gown: "Stay a little longer," said he; "I
want to look at every thing:" his curiosity dilated with his hopes. When
Mad. de Rosier complied with his request to "stay a little longer,"
he had even the politeness to push a stool towards her, saying, "You'd
better sit down; you will be tired of standing, as some people say they
are;--but I'm not one of them. Tell 'em to give me down that wonderful
thing, that I may see what it is, will you?"
The wonderful thing which had caught Herbert's attention was a dry
printing press. Mad. de Rosier was glad to procure this little machine
for Herbert, for she hoped that the new associations of pleasure which
he would form with the types in the little compositor's stick, would
efface the painful remembrance of his early difficulties with the
syllables in the spelling-book. She also purchased a box of models
of common furniture, which were made to take to pieces, and to be put
together again, and on which the names of all the parts were printed.
A number of other useful toys tempted her, but she determined not to be
too profuse: she did not wish to purchase the love of her little
pupils by presents; her object was to provide them with independent
occupations; to create a taste for industry, without the dangerous
excitation of continual variety.
Isabella was delighted with the idea of filling up a small biographical
chart, which resembled Priestley's; she was impatient also to draw the
map of the world upon a small silk balloon, which could be filled with
common air, or folded up flat at pleasure.
Matilda, after much hesitation, said she had decided in her mind, just
as they were going out of the shop. She chose a small loom for weaving
riband and tape, which Isabella admired, because she remembered to have
seen it described in "Townsend's Travels:" but, before the man could put
up the loom for Matilda, she begged to have a little machine for drawing
in perspective, because the person who showed it assured her that it
required _no sort of genius_ to draw perfectly well in perspective with
this instrument.
In their way home, Mad. de Rosier stopped the carriage at a circulating
library. "Are you going to ask for the novel we were talking of
yesterday?" cried Matilda.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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