MATILDA, after a long silence, in which she was endeavouring, but in vain, to arrange her ideas and calm the incessant beating of her heart, said, timidly and abruptly, with her eyes fixed on the carpet—“Do you think, ma’am, that if Ellen had ever been very, very naughty and saucy to you, who are so good to her, that you could ever really in your heart forgive her?”

“I certainly should consider it my duty to punish her for her disobedience, by withholding my usual expressions of love and my general indulgences from her; but I should undoubtedly forgive her, because, in the first place, God has commanded me to forgive all trespasses, and in the second, my heart would be drawn naturally towards my own child.”

“But surely, dear Mrs. Harewood, it is worse for an own child to behave ill to a parent than any other person?”

“Undoubtedly, my dear, for it unites the crime of ingratitude to that of disobedience; besides, it is cruel and unnatural to be guilty of insolence and hard-heartedness towards the hand which has reared and fostered us all our lives—which has loved us in despite of our faults—watched over our infancy—instructed our childhood—nursed us in sickness, and prayed for us before we could pray for ourselves.”

“My mamma has done all this for me a thousand times,” cried Matilda, bursting into tears of bitter contrition, which, for some time, Mrs. Harewood suffered to flow unrestrained; at length she checked herself, but it was only to vent her sorrow by self-accusation—“Oh, ma’am! you cannot think how very ill I have behaved to my dear, dear mother—I have been saucy to her, and bad to every body about me; many a time have I vexed her on purpose; and when she scolded me, I was so pert and disobedient—you can form no idea how bad I was. If she spoke ever so gently to me, I used to tell my papa she had been scolding me, and then he would blame her and justify me; and many a time I have heard deep sighs, that seemed to come from the very bottom of her heart, and the tears would stand in her sweet eyes as she looked at me. Oh, wicked, wicked child that I was, to grieve such a good mamma! and now we are parted such a long, long way, and I cannot beg her pardon—I cannot show her that I am trying to be good; perhaps she may die, as poor papa did, and I shall never, never see her more.”

The agonies of the repentant girl, as this afflictive thought came over her mind, arose to desperation; and Mrs. Harewood, who felt much for her, endeavoured to bestow some comfort upon her; but poor Matilda, who was ever violent, even in her better feelings, could not, for a long time, listen to the kind voice of her consoler—she could only repeat her own faults, recapitulate all the crimes she had been guilty of, and display, in all their native hideousness, such traits of ill-humour, petulance, ungovernable fury, outrageous passion, and vile revenge, as are the natural offspring of the human heart, when its bad propensities are matured by indulgence, particularly in those warm countries, where the mind partakes the nature of the soil, and slavery in one race of beings gives power to all the bad passions of another.

At length the storm of anguish so far gave way, that Mrs. Harewood was able to command her attention, and she seized this precious season of penitence and humility to imprint the leading truths of Christianity, and those plain and invaluable doctrines which are deducible from them, and evident to the capacity of any sensible child, without leading from the more immediate object of her anxiety; as Mrs. Harewood very justly concluded, that if she saw her error as a child, and could be brought to conquer her faults as such, it would include every virtue to be expected at her time of life, and would lay the foundation of all those which we estimate in the female character.

“Oh,” cried Matilda, sobbing, “if I could kneel at her feet, if I could humble myself lower than the lowest negro to my dear mamma, and once hear her say she forgave me, I could be comforted; but I do not like to be comforted without this; I am angry at myself, and I ought to be angry.”

“But, my dear little girl,” replied Mrs. Harewood, “though you cannot thus humble yourself in your body, yet you are conscious that you are humbled in your mind, and that your penitence will render you guarded for the time to come; and let it be your consolation to know, though your mother is absent, the ears of your heavenly Father are ever open to your sorrows; and that, if you lament your sins to him, he will assuredly accept your repentance, and dispose the heart of your dear mother to accept it also. I sincerely pity you, not as heretofore, for your folly, but for your sorrow; and in order to enable you to comprehend what I mean by repenting before God, I will compose you a short prayer, which will both express your feelings, and remind you of your duty towards yourself and your mother.”

Matilda received this act of kindness from her good friend with real gratitude; and when she had committed it to memory, and adopted it in addressing Almighty God, she found her spirits revive, with the hope that she should one day prove worthy of that kind parent, whom, when she lived with her, she was too apt to slight and disobey. As her judgment became more enlightened, she saw more clearly into the errors of her past education, and became perfectly aware that the love of her too-indulgent father had been productive of innumerable pains, as well as faults. She found herself much more happy now than she had ever been in her life; yet she had never so few indulgences—she had no slaves to wait on her, no little black children to execute her commands and submit to her temper; she was not coaxed to the dainties of a luxurious table, nor had costly clothes spread before her to court her choice, nor any foolish friend to repeat all she said, as if she were a prodigy of wit and talent; and all these things, she well remembered, were accorded to her as a kind of inheritance in Barbadoes; but, along with them, she remembered having violent passions, in which she committed excesses, for which she afterwards felt keen remorse, because she saw how they wounded her mother, and shamed even her doting father—ill-humour and low spirits, that rendered every thing irksome to her, and many pains and fevers, from which she was now entirely free; and she found, in the conversation, books, and instructions of her young friends, amusement to which nothing she had enjoyed before would bear comparison; for what in life is so delightful as knowledge, except the sense of having performed some particular benefit to our fellow-creatures?