"
"How I do wish I was rich!" cried Tom; "I would give you an
apricot-tree, and all manner of things besides. I should like to be as
rich as our Squire best; but it would do to be as rich as Farmer
Tomkyns. Oh, if I had only half as many sheep, and pigs, and cows, and
haystacks, as he has, how happy I should be! Don't you wish you had some
of the Squire's or Farmer Tomkyns's riches, Ned?"
"No," replied Ned, "I don't; because we ought not to wish for other
people's things."
He then told Tom all that he could remember of what his grandmother had
said to him about the sin of coveting what does not belong to us; and
that doing so, besides breaking one commandment, is very likely to lead
to the breaking of others also.
"But," asked Tom, "how is it possible to help longing sometimes for
things we have not got, and yet see other people have?" "We may not,"
said Ned's grandmother, who had come out to call the boys in to tea, and
had overheard the latter part of their conversation; "we may not,
perhaps, be always able to prevent covetous or envious thoughts from
entering our mind; but we should directly endeavour to drive them away,
and pray to God to make us contented with 'that state of life in which
it has pleased Him to place us.
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