JANET DONCASTSR.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 222, 1 October 1887, Page 7

JANET DONCASTSR.

Janet Doncaster's youth was passed in the narrow No i borough society. Jfers was not at all a merry chilclhooc . In the first place, Mrs Donca&ter had been very disappointed that her child was a daughter and not a son. .She had set her heart upon having a .son, and bringing him up to be a missionary. A girl could not be a missionary, and was consequently not so interesting to Mis Doncaster as a boy would have been Then to her mother's anxious eyes, Janet at the early age of three years and a half showed unmistakable signs of a worldly disposition. The giddy infant was highly delighted with new clothes, and the smarter the}' were the better she liked them. She learned to sing nigger melodies that she heard sung in the street much more quickly than she learned to sing Dr. Watts's hymns. She drew no hard and fast line between Sunday stoiies and Monday stories ; she would ask first for Jack the Giant Killer, and then for Daniel in the lion's den, in a manner that made her mother tiemble. When she said her prayers at her mother's knee, Mrs Donca&ter having impressed upon her that she was not to lcavn any form of prayer, but to a&k of God from her heart whatever &l>e most desired to have, she prayed for "a red cloak with velvet buttons, 'xactly like Army Grey's Vcrc is anovcr at ye shop." Then, when instructed not to ask for material but for spiritual blessing, her interpietation of a spiiitual blessing was that there might always be shoit sermons in church. When she had scarlatina, and Mrs Donca&ter had begged her to pray for her recovery, Janet, having been told that when she was beginning to get better her skin would peel off, and that when it was all otF she would be quite well, joined her little hands in bed and said in a soft voice, " 0 God, peel me quick." Made desperate by the comical tilings Janet asked for her in her prayeis, Mrs Doncaster at length taught Janet a mixed foira of prayer, and thus excluded the possibility of inconvenient originality. — " Janet Doncaster,"' by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.