This eBook was produced by Les Bowler. [Picture: Book cover] [Picture: The orphans] THE PARENT’S ASSISTANT OR STORIES FOR CHILDREN BY MARIA EDGEWORTH “’Tis Education forms the common mind,— Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” POPE. * * * * * _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. A. FRASER_ * * * * * LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL MANCHESTER, GLASGOW, AND NEW YORK 1891 * * * * * PREFACE, ADDRESSED TO PARENTS. OUR great lexicographer, in his celebrated eulogium on Dr. Watts, thus speaks in commendation of those productions which he so successfully penned for the pleasure and instruction of the juvenile portion of the community. “For children,” says Dr. Johnson, “he condescended to lay aside the philosopher, the scholar, and the wit, to write little poems of devotion, and systems of instruction adapted to their wants and capacities, from the dawn of reason to its gradation of advance in the morning of life. Every man acquainted with the common principles of human action, will look with veneration on the writer, who is at one time combating Locke, and at another time making a catechism for _children in their fourth year_. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson which humility can teach.” It seems, however, no very easy task to write for children. Those only who have been interested in the education of a family, who have patiently followed children through the first processes of reasoning, who have daily watched over their thoughts and feelings—those only who know with what ease and rapidity the early association of ideas are formed, on which the future taste, character and happiness depend, can feel the dangers and difficulties of such an undertaking.