Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/124

 right and fittin' to brag about my children, Ma'am. It seems as if I thought my geese were all swans."

"It gives me pleasure, my good friend, to hear of the welfare of your family, and the habits of industry in which you are training them. I hope that you are also careful, that their minds are stored with useful knowledge."

"O yes Ma'am. They all go to the deestrict-school, more than ha-of o' the winter; though it's nigh upon two mild from the house. In the summer time, it's kept a leetle spell by a woman—and then the younger ones go, to keep 'em out o' the way o' them who are glad to work at home. I s'pose they larn somethin' about sewin' and readin'. But Tim, the third child, he's the boy for larnin'. He took a prodigious likin' to books, when he was a baby; and if you only show'd him one, he'd put it rite into his mouth, and stop squallin'. He 'ant but eleven year old now; and when he gets a newspaper, there's no whoa to him, no more than to our black ox when he sees the haystack, till he's read it clear through, advertisements and all. The Master says that he's the smartest of all the boys about spellin', and now he takes to cypherin marvellously. So that I don't know but sometime or other, he may be hired to keep our deestrict-school. But I hope my heart a'nt lifted up with pride, at sich great prospects, for I know that "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace unto the humble."

"I trust you will always remember that humility is necessary to our religion. But it is equally your duty to