_Could_ you have killed it?
asked the teacher.

Yes, but that would have been cruel and naughty, and a sin against God.

The little moralists were acquitted by acclamation; having, infants as they were, manifested a character which, were it universal in the juvenile population, would in another generation reduce our moral code to a mass of waste paper, in one grand department of its bulk.
"This anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold.

How many men who have suffered death for murder, could date their first steps towards it, from the time when in infancy they tortured a fly, or spun a cock-chaffer.
"The teacher mentioned to the children one day, that he had been occupied about a boy and a girl who had no father or mother, and whose grandfather and grandmother, who took care of them, were bed-rid and in great poverty.

The boy was seven years of age, too old for the infant school, but some gentlemen, he said, were exerting themselves to get the boy into one of the hospitals.