Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LESSON III. ANIMAL CONTENT. "By eports like these are all their cares beguiled; The sports of children satisfy the child.1' Goldsmith. " Ay, give me back the joyous hours When I, myself, was ripening too; When song, the fount, flung up its showers Of beauty, ever fresh and new." Goethe's Fattst. I HAVE been watching a family of kittens, engaged in their exquisitely graceful play. Near them lay their mother, stretched at her length upon the flagging, taking her morning nap, and warming herself in the sun. She had eaten her breakfast, (provided by no care of her own, but at my expense,) had seen her little family fed, and having nothing further to attend to, had gone off into a doze. What a blessed freedom from care ! Think of a family of four children, with no frocks to be made for them, no hair to brush, noshoes to provide, no socks tqjknit and mend, no school- books to buy, and no nurse ! Think of a living being with the love of offspring in her bosom, and a multitude of marvellous instincts in her nature, yet knowing nothing of God, thinking not of the future, without a hope or an expectation, or a doubt or a fear, passing straight on to annihilation! At the threshold of this destiny the little kittens were carelessly playing; and they are doubtless still playing, while I write. They have no lessons to learn, they do not have to go to Sunday-school, they entertain no prejudices, except against dogs which occasionally dodge into the yard; and I judge, by the familiar way in which they play with their mother's ears, and pounce upon her tail, that they are not in any degree oppressed by a sense of the respect due to a parent. Cat and kittens will eat, and frolic, and sleep, through their brief life, and then they will curl up in some dark corner and die. I...