Lewie | Page 3

that she must expect instant and severe punishment, if
Lewie was heard to scream again.
Still Lewie demanded the work-box, and nothing that the patient little
Agnes could do would divert his attention from it for a moment. The
little angry brow was contracted, and the mouth wide open for another
shriek, when little Agnes, with a sigh of despair, went to the side-board,
and, mounting on a chair, lifted down her much-valued and
carefully-preserved treasure, saying to herself:
"If Aunt Ellen only knew, I think she would not blame me!"
And now with a shout of delight the spoiled child seized on the pretty
work-box; and in another moment, winders, spools, scissors, thimble,
were scattered in sad confusion over the carpet. In vain did little Agnes
try, as she picked up one after the other of her pretty things, to conceal
them from the baby's sight; if one was gone, he knew it in a moment,
and worried till it was restored to him.
Finally, laying open the cover of the box, he began to pound with a
little hammer, which was lying near him, upon the looking-glass inside
of it; and, pleased with the noise it made, he struck harder and still
harder blows.
"No, no, Lewie! please don't! You will break sister's pretty
looking-glass. No! Lewie must not!" And Agnes held his little hand. At
this the passionate child threw himself back violently on the floor, and
screamed and shrieked in a paroxysm of rage; in the midst of which,
the threatened punishment came upon poor little Agnes, in the shape of
a sharp blow upon her cheek, from the soft, white hand of her mother,
who exclaimed:
"There! didn't I tell you so? It seems to be your greatest pleasure to
teaze and torment that poor baby; and you know he is sick, too. Now,
miss, the next time he screams, I shall take you to the north room, and
lock you up, and keep you there on bread and water all day!"
Agnes retreated to a corner, and wept silently, but very bitterly, not so
much from the pain of the blow, as from a sense of injustice and harsh
treatment at the hands of one who should have loved her; and the
mother returned to her novel, in which she was soon as deep as ever. At
the same moment, the looking-glass in the cover of the work-box flew
into fifty pieces, under the renewed blows of the hammer in Master

Lewie's hand.
The little conqueror now had free range among his sister's hitherto
carefully-guarded treasures; her bits of work, and little trinkets, tokens
of affection from her kind aunt and her young cousins at Brook Farm,
were ruthlessly torn in pieces, or broken and strewed over the floor.
Agnes sat in mute despair. She knew that as long as her mother was
absorbed in the novel, no sound would disturb her less powerful than
Lewie's screams, and that all else that might be going on in the room
would pass unnoticed by her. So, wiping her eyes, she sat still in the
corner, watching Lewie with silent anguish, as he revelled among her
precious things, as "happy as a king" in the work of destruction, and
only hoping that he might not discover one secret little spot in the
corner of the box where her dearest treasure was concealed.
But at length she started, and, with an exclamation of horror, and a cry
like that of pain, she sprang towards her little brother, and violently
wrenched something from his hand. And now the piercing shrieks of
the angry and astonished child filled the house, and brought even Old
Mammy to the room, to see what was the matter with the baby.
Mammy opened the door just in time to witness the severe punishment
inflicted upon little Agnes, and to receive an order to take that naughty
girl to the north room, and lock her in, and leave her there till farther
orders.
Agnes had not spoken before, when rebuked by her mother; but now,
raising her mild blue eyes, all dimmed by tears, to her mother's face,
she said:
"Oh, mamma! it was papa's hair!--it was that soft curl I cut from his
forehead, as he lay in his coffin, Lewie was going to tear the paper!"
But even this touching appeal, which should have found its way to the
young widow's heart, was unheeded by her--perhaps, in the storm of
passion, it was unheard; and Agnes was led away by Mammy to a cold,
unfurnished room, where she had been doomed to spend many an hour,
when _Lewie was cross_; while the fretful and half-sick child, now
tired of his last play-thing, was taken in his mother's arms, and rocked
till he fell