|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
|
these mistakes, calling Topsy to him whenever he had a mind to amuse himself, and getting her to repeat the offending passages, in spite of Miss Ophelia’s remon- strances. “How do you think I can do anything with the child, if you will go on so, Augustine?” she would say. “Well, it is too bad,- I won’t again; but I do like to hear the droll little image stumble over those big words!” “But you confirm her in the wrong way.” “What’s the odds? One word is as good as another to her.” “You wanted me to bring her up right; and you ought to remember she is a rea- sonable creature, and be careful of your influence over her.” “O, dismal! so I ought; but, as Topsy herself says, ‘I’s so wicked!’” In very much this way Topsy’s training proceeded, for a year or two,- Miss Ophelia worrying herself, from day to day, with her, as a kind of chronic plague, to whose inflictions she became, in time, as accustomed, as persons sometimes do to the neuralgia or sick headache. St. Clare took the same kind of amusement in the child that a man might in the tricks of a parrot or a pointer. Topsy, whenever her sins brought her into dis- grace in other quarters, always took refuge behind his chair; and St. Clare, in one way or other, would make peace for her. From him she got many a stray pica- yune, which she laid out in nuts and candies, and distributed, with careless gener- |
