Clever Alice
Eric and his best friend David Baker discuss his matrimonial prospects:
“You are as bad as _Clever Alice_ in the fairy tale who worried over the future of her unborn children,” protested Eric.
“_Clever Alice_ has been very unjustly laughed at,” said David gravely. “We doctors know that. Perhaps she overdid the worrying business a little, but she was perfectly right in principle. If people worried a little more about their unborn children–at least, to the extent of providing a proper heritage, physically, mentally, and morally, for them–and then stopped worrying about them after they ARE born, this world would be a very much pleasanter place to live in, and the human race would make more progress in a generation than it has done in recorded history.”:
-Kilmeny of the Orchard ch.1
Clever Alice
Craik, Dinah Maria
ONCE upon a time there was a man who had a daughter who was called “Clever Alice, and when she was grown up, her father said, “We must see about her marrying.
“Yes, replied her mother, “whenever a young man shall appear who is worthy of her.
At last a certain youth, by name Hans, came from a distance to make a proposal of marriage; but he required one condition, that the clever Alice should be very prudent.
“Oh, said her father, “no fear of that! she has got a head full of brains; and the mother added, “ah, she can see the wind blow up the street, and hear the flies cough!”
“Very well, replied Hans; “but remember, if she is not very prudent, I will not take her. Soon afterward they sat down to dinner, and her mother said, “Alice, go down into the cellar and draw some beer.”
So Clever Alice took the jug down from the wall, and went into the cellar, jerking the lid up and down on her way, to pass away the time.
The entire story can be read as part of the The Little Lame Prince at University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center
