The Prodigal Daughter
Character building stories by Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 – March 6, 1885) Timothy Shay Arthur has done more for American literature than any one other person. His name will be remembered and loved, when those of his critics will be forgotten, together with their productions. I doubt if there is another man in the country who has done such a vast, such a measureless amount of good with the pen. There is probably not another American writer who has produced so much, as Arthur." "Arthur was the most popular and widely read author of his times!""All of the books from the pen of Timothy Shay Arthur are most interesting, and of a high moral and useful tone. To read any of them, must improve the character and the conduct. Mr. Arthur's works are all wholesome; they inculcate morality and purify the feelings — by tastefully illustrating the beauties of virtue, and the iniquities of vice. "His works will be read with interest by all the admirers of wholesome novels, and will be seized on with avidity by the thousands of readers who prefer Mr. Arthur's useful and instructive sketches — to the flimsy novels which overstock the market. To Mr. Arthur the public are indebted for a species of composition that while it affords delight, conveys at the same time, many moral and practical lessons for life." (Editor, 1855)
Character building stories by Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 – March 6, 1885) Timothy Shay Arthur has done more for American literature than any one other person. His name will be remembered and loved, when those of his critics will be forgotten, together with their productions. I doubt if there is another man in the country who has done such a vast, such a measureless amount of good with the pen. There is probably not another American writer who has produced so much, as Arthur."
"Arthur was the most popular and widely read author of his times!""All of the books from the pen of Timothy Shay Arthur are most interesting, and of a high moral and useful tone. To read any of them, must improve the character and the conduct. Mr. Arthur's works are all wholesome; they inculcate morality and purify the feelings — by tastefully illustrating the beauties of virtue, and the iniquities of vice.
"His works will be read with interest by all the admirers of wholesome novels, and will be seized on with avidity by the thousands of readers who prefer Mr. Arthur's useful and instructive sketches — to the flimsy novels which overstock the market. To Mr. Arthur the public are indebted for a species of composition that while it affords delight, conveys at the same time, many moral and practical lessons for life." (Editor, 1855)
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CHAPTER 6.<br />
"Shall I read to you, mother?" asked little Alice, now six years old.<br />
"Yes, dear. Draw a chair up to the table, and while I sit here in bed and sew,<br />
you can read for me."<br />
Thus do we again introduce Mrs. Anderson, five years from the day she<br />
moved, with her husband, from Washington to Baltimore. <strong>The</strong> store in which<br />
her husband had engaged, was a liquor store, or cheap tavern, where he spent<br />
most of his time, becoming more and more dissipated and brutalized in his<br />
feelings every day. For a short time, he provided scantily for his wife and<br />
children, but soon he neglected them again, cruelly. <strong>The</strong> burden of almost<br />
their entire maintenance fell, of course, upon his wife, in whose delicate<br />
frame, disease had begun to make painful inroads. Her nervous system had<br />
become much shattered, and there were, besides, too apparent symptoms of a<br />
pulmonary disease, but not of the worst kind. Still, she was a daily sufferer,<br />
and much of her time she was unable to sit up in her chair, but had to prop<br />
herself up in bed with pillows, where, half seated, half reclining, she would<br />
ply her needle all day, and frequently for half the night.<br />
James, her eldest boy, who was nine years old, had, with sympathies and<br />
right thoughts developed at that tender age, sought and obtained a job in a<br />
cigar factory, and was earning a dollar and a half, and sometimes two dollars,<br />
a week. He had been taught to read well, and write a little, by her for whom<br />
he was now devoting his young years, cheerfully, to daily and often nightly<br />
toil.<br />
Little Alice has numbered six summers, and has also learned to feel for and<br />
sympathize with her mother. She, too, has been taught to read. As directed in<br />
the opening of this chapter, she brought a book and laid it upon the table,<br />
which had been drawn up to the bed, on which reclined her mother. She then<br />
sat down, and opening the book, commenced reading. It was the book she<br />
most loved herself to read, and which her mother most liked to have read —<br />
the Bible. Turning to the book of Psalms, the little girl read slowly.<br />
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