Page:Stories told to a child.djvu/198

 then made a reply to the effect, that all the golden opportunities seemed to happen to very rich people, or people who lived a long time ago, or else to great men, whose lives we can read in books—very great men, such as Wilberforce and Howard; but they never happened to real people, whom we could see every day, nor to children.'

'To children like you, Orris?' said my mother; 'why, what kind of a golden opportunity are you wishing for just now?'

My reply was childish enough.

'If I were a great man I should like to sail after the slave ships, fight them, and take back the poor slaves to their own country. Or I should like to do something like what Quintus Curtius did. Not exactly like that; because you know, mamma, if I were to jump into a gulf, that would not really make it close.'

'No,' said my mother, 'it would not.'

'And besides,' I reasoned, 'if it had closed, I should never have known of the good I had done, because I should have been killed.'

'Certainly,' said my mother; I saw her smile, and thinking it was at the folly of my last wish, hastened to bring forward a wiser one.

'I think I should like to be a great lady, and then if there had been a bad harvest, and all the poor people on my lord's land were nearly starving, I should like to come down to them with a purse full of money, and divide it among them. But you see, mamma, I have no golden opportunities.'

'My dear, we all have some opportunities for doing Rh