A Little Princess

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

‘I don’t like it, papa,’ she said. ‘But then I dare say soldiers – even brave ones – don’t really like going into battle.’

‘The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books.

‘Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.’

You have to bear things. Think what soldiers bear!

‘Things happen to people by accident,’ she used to say. ‘A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them.

‘I don’t know whether I can,’ answered Sara, still in her half-whisper, ‘but I will try.’

She knows that stories belong to everybody.’

‘Why,’ she said, ‘we are just the same – I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!’

‘She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do.’

If you suppose anything hard enough it seems as if it were real.’

‘But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand.

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

‘Everything’s a story. You are a story – I am a story.

When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in – that’s stronger.

‘Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls.

‘I’ve noticed this. What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.’

‘And lies – well, you see, they are not only wicked – they’re vulgar.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘to be able to learn things quickly isn’t everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people.

‘If it ain’t here in the mornin’, miss,’ she said ‘it’s been here tonight, anyways, an’ I shan’t never forget it.’

Anyone who is kind wants to know when people have been made happy. They care for that more than for being thanked.