on
was at all fatiguing or disagreeable to you?"

15. "Not in the least," replied the pendulum; "it is not of six strokes
that I complain, nor of sixty, but of _millions_."

16. "Very good," replied the dial; "but recollect, that though you may
_think_ of a million strokes in an instant, you are required to
_execute_ but one; and that, however often you may hereafter have to
swing, a moment will always be given you to swing in."

17. "That consideration staggers me, I confess," said the
pendulum.--"Then I hope," resumed the dial-plate, "we shall all
immediately return to our duty; for the maids will lie in bed, if we
stand idling thus."

18. Upon this, the weights, who had never been accused of _light_
conduct, used all their influence in urging him to proceed; when, as
with one consent, the wheels began to turn, the hands began to move, the
pendulum began to swing, and, to its credit, ticked as loud as ever;
while a red beam of the rising sun, that streamed through a hole in the
kitchen window, shining full upon the dial-plate, it brightened up, as
if nothing had been the matter.

19. When the farmer came down to breakfast that morning, upon looking at
the clock, he declared that his watch had gained half an hour in the
night.

LESSON V.

_Address of the Author to the Pupil,--continued from Lesson 3d._

1. The fable of the old clock, which has just been read, is intended to
teach us a lesson, or moral, and that is, that whenever we have anything
to do, whether it be a long lesson or a piece of hard work, we must not
think of it all at once, but divide the labor, and thus conquer the
difficulty.

2. The pendulum was discouraged when it thought that it had to tick
eighty-six thousand four hundred times in twenty-four hours; but when
the dial asked it to tick half a dozen times only, the pendulum
confessed that it was not fatiguing or disagreeable to do so.

3. It was only by thinking what a large number of times it had to tick
in twenty-four hours, that it became fatigued.

4. Now, suppose that a little boy, or a little girl, has a hard lesson
to learn, and, instead of sitting down quietly and trying to learn a
little of it at a time, and after that a little more, until it is all
learned, should begin to cry, and say I cannot learn all of this lesson,
it is too long, or too hard, and I never can get it, that little boy, or
girl, would act just as the pendulum did when it complained of the hard
work