"Now," added Mrs. Goodriche, "I am thinking that I am very like Dame Trot; she never left her house but she found her cat at some prank when she returned, and I never leave the room but I find you off and at some trick or another when I come back; but now for our book." Bessy, before she took her book, rubbed her hands down the sides of her frock to clean them from any soil they might have got from the gooseberries. It was a new black cotton, with small white spots, and was none the better for having been made a hand-towel. Mrs. Goodriche saw this neat trick, but she felt that if she found fault with everything amiss in her niece, she should have nothing else to do; so she let that pass. Bessy, at last, opened the book and began to read. The first story began with the account of a lady and gentleman who had one son and a daughter, of whom they were vastly fond, and whom they indulged in everything they could desire, which (as the writer sagely hinted) they had cause to repent before many years had passed. "Whilst their children were little, there was nothing in the shape of toys which were not got for them; dolls, whips, tops, carts, and all other sorts of playthings, were heaped up in confusion in their play-room; but they were not content with wooden toys--they had no delight in those but to break them in pieces. They were ever greedy after nice things to eat, and when they got them, made themselves often sick by eating too much of them. Once Master Tommy actually ate up----" In this place Bessy stopped to turn over a leaf with her thumb, and then went on, first repeating the last words of the first page. "--Master Tommy actually ate up the real moon out of the sky." "What! What!" cried Mrs. Goodriche; "ate the moon? Are you sure, Bessy?" [Illustration: "_'What! What!' cried Mrs. Goodriche._"--Page 305.] "Yes, it is here," replied Bessy; "the real moon out of the sky--these are the very words." "Nonsense!" said Mrs. Goodriche; "dear child, you are reading nonsense; don't you perceive it?" "I don't know," replied Bessy, gaping; "I was not attending--what is it?" "Don't you know what you have been reading?" asked Mrs. Goodriche. "To be sure I do," answered Bessy, "or how could I have told the words right?" "But the sense?" asked Mrs. Goodriche. "I was not happening," replied Bessy, "just to be thinking about that. I was thinking just then, aunt, of the horrid fright Sukey was in when the bricks came rolling down, and how she did scream." "Give me the book," said Mrs. Goodriche, almost at the end of her patience; "we will read no more to-day; go up and fetch that unfortunate bombazine frock, it must be darned; you have no other here, or indeed made, but that you have on."