When she felt it most, she only said, "It's all just as it should be." And so it was.

Boys and ducklings must wander off some time, be mothers and hens never so kind! The world is wide, and duck-ponds are deep.

The young ones must go alone, and those who tremble most for their safety cannot follow to take care of them.
I really shrink from realizing to myself what Nurse Bundle must have suffered whilst I was learning to ride.

The novel exercise, the stimulus of risk, that "put new life into me," were to her so many daily grounds for the sad probability of my death.
"Every blessed afternoon do I look to see him brought home on a shutter, with his precious neck broken, poor lamb!" she exclaimed one afternoon, overpowered by the sight of me climbing on to the pony's back, which performance I had brought her downstairs to witness, and endeavoured to render more entertaining and creditable by secretly stimulating the pony to restlessness, and then hopping after him with one foot in the stirrup, in what I fancied to be a very knowing manner.
"Why, my dear Mrs.Bundle," said my father, smiling, "you kill him at least three hundred and sixty-four times oftener in the course of the year than you need.

If he does break his neck, he can only do it once, and you bewail his loss every day." "Now, Heaven bless the young gentleman, sir, and meaning no disrespect, but don't ye go for to tempt Providence by joking about it, and him perhaps brought a hopeless corpse to the side door this very evening," said Mrs.Bundle, her red cheeks absolutely blanched by the vision she had conjured up.