"If God had seen fit to gratify your pride, in your children, He would have provided a way for you in which you could have done it honestly. As he did not, you ought to have submitted to your lot, and done the best that you could." How hollow those words sounded to me as they came from my lips. How easy it is to preach sound doctrine. How hard to make an impression, with it, upon minds and hearts established in their own opinions of right and wrong, and persistent in the determination to follow the wrong! If I could have had that woman under my influence a year, I might have led her into different views and ways. She was not wholly hardened, as her tears showed. "God did intend that I should have it, and that was His way of giving it to me. He made me light-fingered, and gave me a chance to help myself. I'm willing to leave it to Him. I don't believe He will judge me any harder than He will those I took it from." She fell back again upon what others do. I had made no progress in dispossessing her of the idea that the wrong of another mitigated her own. "The command reads, '_Thou_ shalt not steal.' If the men that keep those large stores steal, you are not responsible for it. It is only for what you do that you will be called to give an account." "Line upon line," I thought. "I hope you will never come in here again." "I never mean to," and she nodded her head as much as to say, I'll be bright enough to avoid that. "I hope you will never again do the things that brought you here." "I shall, ma'am. For every day I'm in here, I'll have five dollars out of 'em." She did not say this so vauntingly as she had made the assertion at first. Still there was the spirit of retaliation, of revenge, upon some one for her punishment. "In doing that, who do you think you will spite?" She stopped to think a moment. The question had taken her at unawares. "I don't know. Them that put me here." "But if you go into their store, they will know you, and watch you, and you will get caught again." "Then I'll have it out of some of the rest of them." "How will that spite the ones that sent you here?" "They're all alike. It won't make any difference which I take it from." "They are not all alike, any more than you and I are alike because we, just now, happen to be in the same place. If you go out of here and steal again, you spite yourself, and the punishment for it will fall upon your own head, and on the heads of those poor children that you have brought into the world. Those poor little things that are bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh. Does not the mother-heart melt within you in pity for those children when they come to find out that their mother is a thief? O Sarah, if you are not afraid of God's judgment, which is the most fearful thing that can overtake you, let your children be in your thoughts when you go to take what is not your own, and turn you from your wicked purpose."