Work and Win

The incidents which make up the story are introduced to illustrate the moral status of the youth, at the beginning, and to develop the influences from which proceeded a gentle and Christian character. Mollie, the captain's daughter, whose simple purity of life, whose filial devotion to an erring parent, and whose trusting faith in the hour of adversity, won the love and respect of Noddy, was not the least of these influences. If the writer has not "moralized," it was because the true life, seen with the living eye, is better than any precept, however skillfully it may be dressed by the rhetorical genius of the moralist.