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The Parent's Assistant by Maria Edgeworth
Book, page 381 / 462


vineyard helping to tend the vines, "I am to thank you and your honesty,
it seems, for our having our hands so full of business this season. It
is fair you should have a share of our profits."

"So I have, father, enough and enough, when I see you and mother going on
so well. What can I want more?"

"Oh, my brave boy, we know you are a grateful, good son; but I have been
your age myself; you have companions, you have little expenses of your
own. Here; this vine, this fig-tree, and a melon a week next summer
shall be yours. With these make a fine figure amongst the little
Neapolitan merchants; and all I wish is that you may prosper as well, and
by the same honest means, in managing for yourself, as you have done
managing for me."

"Thank you, father; and if I prosper at all, it shall be by those means,
and no other, or I should not be worthy to be called your son."

Piedro the cunning did not make quite so successful a summer's work as
did Francisco the honest. No extraordinary events happened, no singular
instance of bad or good luck occurred; but he felt, as persons usually
do, the natural consequences of his own actions. He pursued his scheme
of imposing, as far as he could, upon every person he dealt with; and the
consequence was, that at last nobody would deal with him.

"It is easy to outwit one person, but impossible to outwit all the
world," said a man * who knew the world at least as well as either Piedro
or his father.

* The Duke de Rochefoucault.--"On peut etre puls fin qu'un autre, mais
pas plus fin que tous les autres."

Piedro's father, amongst others, had reason to complain. He saw his own
customers fall off from him, and was told, whenever he went into the
market, that his son was such a cheat there was no dealing with him. One
day, when he was returning from the market in a very bad humour, in
consequence of these reproaches, and of his not having found customers
for his goods, he espied his SMART son Piedro at a little merchant's
fruit-board devouring a fine gourd with prodigious greediness. "Where,
glutton, do you find money to pay for these dainties?" exclaimed his

 
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