BITS ABOUT HOME MATTERS. 

By H. H. , Author of "Verses" and "Bits of Travel. "

1873

Contents. 

The Inhumanities of Parents--Corporal PunishmentThe Inhumanities of Parents--Needless DenialsThe Inhumanities of Parents--RudenessBreaking the WillThe Reign of ArchelausThe Awkward AgeA Day with a Courteous MotherChildren in Nova ScotiaThe Republic of the FamilyThe Ready-to-HaltsThe Descendants of Nabal"Boys not allowed"Half an Hour in a Railway StationA Genius for AffectionRainy DaysFriends of the PrisonersA Companion for the WinterChoice of ColorsThe Apostle of BeautyEnglish Lodging-HousesWet the ClayThe King's FriendLearning to speakPrivate TyrantsMarginThe Fine Art of SmilingDeath-bed RepentanceThe Correlation of Moral ForcesA Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas DinnerChildren's PartiesAfter-supper TalkHysteria in LiteratureJog TrotThe Joyless AmericanSpiritual TeethingGlass HousesThe Old-Clothes Monger in JournalismThe Country Landlord's SideThe Good Staff of PleasureWanted--a Home

Bits of Talk. 

The Inhumanities of Parents--Corporal Punishment. 

Not long ago a Presbyterian minister in Western New York whipped histhree-year-old boy to death, for refusing to say his prayers. The littlefingers were broken; the tender flesh was bruised and actually mangled;strong men wept when they looked on the body; and the reverend murderer, after having been set free on bail, was glad to return and take refugewithin the walls of his prison, to escape summary punishment at the handsof an outraged community. At the bare mention of such cruelty, every heartgrew sick and faint; men and women were dumb with horror: only tears and ahot demand for instant retaliation availed. 

The question whether, after all, that baby martyr were not fortunate amonghis fellows, would, no doubt, be met by resentful astonishment. But it isa question which may well be asked, may well be pondered. Heart-rending asit is to think for an instant of the agonies which the poor child musthave borne for some hours after his infant brain was too bewildered byterror and pain to understand what was required of him, it still cannotfail to occur to deeper reflection that the torture was short and small incomparison with what the next ten years might have held for him if he hadlived. To earn entrance on the spiritual life by the briefest possibleexperience of the physical, is always "greater gain;" but how emphaticallyis it so when the conditions of life upon earth are sure to beunfavorable!

If it were possible in any way to get a statistical summing-up and atangible presentation of the amount of physical pain inflicted by parentson children under twelve years of age, the most callous-hearted would besurprised and shocked. If it were possible to add to this estimate anaccurate and scientific demonstration of the extent to which such pain, byweakening the nervous system and exhausting its capacity to resistdisease, diminishes children's chances for life, the world would standaghast. 

Too little has been said upon this point. The opponents of corporalpunishment usually approach the subject either from the sentimental or themoral standpoint. The argument on either of these grounds can be madestrong enough, one would suppose, to paralyze every hand lifted to strikea child. But the question of the direct and lasting physical effect ofblows--even of one blow on the delicate tissues of a child's body, on thefrail and trembling nerves, on the sensitive organization which is trying, under a thousand unfavoring conditions, to adjust itself to the hard workof both living and growing--has yet to be properly considered. 

Every one knows the sudden sense of insupportable pain, sometimesproducing even dizziness and nausea, which follows the accidental hittingof the ankle or elbow against a hard substance. It does not need that theblow be very hard to bring involuntary tears to adult eyes. But what issuch a pain as this, in comparison with the pain of a dozen or more quicktingling blows from a heavy hand on flesh which is, which must be as muchmore sensitive than ours, as are the souls which dwell in it purer thanours. Add to this physical pain the overwhelming terror which only utterhelplessness can feel, and which is the most recognizable quality in thecry of a very young child under whipping; add the instinctive sense ofdisgrace, of outrage, which often keeps the older child stubborn and stillthrough-out, --and you have an amount and an intensity of suffering fromwhich even tried nerves might shrink. Again, who does not know--at least, what woman does not know--that violent weeping, for even a very shorttime, is quite enough to cause a feeling of languor and depression, ofnervous exhaustion for a whole day? Yet it does not seem to occur tomothers that little children must feel this, in proportion to the lengthof time and violence of their crying, far more than grown people. Who hasnot often seen a poor child receive, within an hour or two of the firstwhipping, a second one, for some small ebullition of nervousirritability, which was simply inevitable from its spent and worncondition?

It is safe to say that in families where whipping is regularly recognizedas a punishment, few children under ten years of age, and of averagebehavior, have less than one whipping a week. Sometimes they have more, sometimes the whipping is very severe. Thus you have in one short yearsixty or seventy occasions on which for a greater or less time, say fromone to three hours, the child's nervous system is subjected to atremendous strain from the effect of terror and physical pain combinedwith long crying. Will any physician tell us that this fact is not anelement in that child's physical condition at the end of that year? Willany physician dare to say that there may not be, in that child's life, crises when the issues of life and death will be so equally balanced thatthe tenth part of the nervous force lost in such fits of crying, and inthe endurance of such pain, could turn the scale?

Nature's retributions, like her rewards, are cumulative. Because hersentences against evil works are not executed speedily, therefore thehearts of the sons of men are fully set in them to do evil. But thesentence always is executed, sooner or later, and that inexorably. Yourson, O unthinking mother! may fall by the way in the full prime of hismanhood, for lack of that strength which his infancy spent in enduringyour hasty and severe punishments. 

It is easy to say, --and universally is said, --by people who cling to theold and fight against the new, "All this outcry about corporal punishmentis sentimental nonsense. The world is full of men and women, who havegrown up strong and good, in spite of whippings; and as for me, I know Inever had any more whipping than I deserved, or than was good for me. "

Are you then so strong and clear and pure in your physical and spiritualnature and life, that you are sure no different training could have madeeither your body or your soul better? Are these men and women, of whom theworld is full, so able-bodied, whole-souled, strong-minded, that you thinkit needless to look about for any method of making the next generationbetter? Above all, do you believe that it is a part of the legitimateoutworking of God's plan and intent in creating human beings to have morethan one-half of them die in childhood? If we are not to believe that thisfearful mortality is a part of God's plan, is it wise to refuse toconsider all possibilities, even those seemingly most remote, ofdiminishing it?

No argument is so hard to meet (simply because it is not an argument) asthe assumption of the good and propriety of "the thing that hath been. " Itis one of the devil's best sophistries, by which he keeps good peopleundisturbed in doing the things he likes. It has been in all ages thebulwark behind which evils have made stand, and have slain theirthousands. It is the last enemy which shall be destroyed. It is the onlyreal support of the cruel evil of corporal punishment. 

Suppose that such punishment of children had been unheard of till now. Suppose that the idea had yesterday been suggested for the first time thatby inflicting physical pain on a child's body you might make him recollectcertain truths; and suppose that instead of whipping, a very moderate andharmless degree of pricking with pins or cutting with knives or burningwith fire had been suggested. Would not fathers and mothers have cried outall over the land at the inhumanity of the idea?

Would they not still cry out at the inhumanity of one who, as things areto-day, should propose the substitution of pricking or cutting or burningfor whipping? But I think it would not be easy to show in what wise smallpricks or cuts are more inhuman than blows; or why lying may not be aslegitimately cured by blisters made with a hot coal as by black and bluespots made with a ruler. The principle is the same; and if the principlebe right, why not multiply methods?

It seems as if this one suggestion, candidly considered, might be enoughto open all parents' eyes to the enormity of whipping. How many a lovingmother will, without any thought of cruelty, inflict half-a-dozen quickblows on the little hand of her child, when she could no more take a pinand make the same number of thrusts into the tender flesh, than she couldbind the baby on a rack. Yet the pin-thrusts would hurt far less, andwould probably make a deeper impression on the child's mind. 

Among the more ignorant classes, the frequency and severity of corporalpunishment of children, are appalling. The facts only need to be held upclosely and persistently before the community to be recognized as horrorsof cruelty far greater than some which have been made subjects oflegislation. 

It was my misfortune once to be forced to spend several of the hottestweeks of a hot summer in New York. In near neighborhood to my rooms wereblocks of buildings which had shops on the first floor and tenementsabove. In these lived the families of small tradesmen, and mechanics ofthe better sort. During those scorching nights every window was thrownopen, and all sounds were borne with distinctness through the hot stillair. Chief among them were the shrieks and cries of little children, andblows and angry words from tired, overworked mothers. At times it becamealmost unbearable: it was hard to refrain from an attempt at rescue. Ten, twelve, twenty quick, hard blows, whose sound rang out plainly, I countedagain and again; mingling with them came the convulsive screams of thepoor children, and that most piteous thing of all, the reiteration of "Oh, mamma! oh, mamma!" as if, through all, the helpless little creatures hadan instinct that this word ought to be in itself the strongest appeal. These families were all of the better class of work people, comfortableand respectable. What sounds were to be heard in the more wretched hauntsof the city, during those nights, the heart struggled away from fancying. But the shrieks of those children will never wholly die out of the air. Ihear them to-day; and mingling with them, the question rings perpetuallyin my ears, "Why does not the law protect children, before the point atwhich life is endangered?"

A cartman may be arrested in the streets for the brutal beating of a horsewhich is his own, and which he has the right to kill if he so choose. Should not a man be equally withheld from the brutal beating of a childwho is not his own, but God's, and whom to kill is murder?

The Inhumanities of Parents--Needless Denials. 

Webster's Dictionary, which cannot be accused of any leaning towardsentimentalism, defines "inhumanity" as "cruelty in action;" and "cruelty"as "an act of a human being which inflicts unnecessary pain. " The wordinhumanity has an ugly sound, and many inhuman people are utterly andhonestly unconscious of their own inhumanities; it is necessary thereforeto entrench one's self behind some such bulwark as the above definitionsafford, before venturing the accusation that fathers and mothers arehabitually guilty of inhuman conduct in inflicting "unnecessary pain" ontheir children, by needless denials of their innocent wishes and impulses. 

Most men and a great many women would be astonished at being told thatsimple humanity requires them to gratify every wish, even the smallest, oftheir children, when the pain of having that wish denied is not madenecessary, either for the child's own welfare, physical or mental, or bycircumstances beyond the parent's control. The word "necessary" is a veryauthoritative one; conscience, if left free, soon narrows down itsboundaries; inconvenience, hindrance, deprivation, self-denial, one orall, or even a great deal of all, to ourselves, cannot give us a shadow ofright to say that the pain of the child's disappointment is "necessary. "Selfishness grasps at help from the hackneyed sayings, that it is "bestfor children to bear the yoke in their youth;" "the sooner they learn thatthey cannot have their own way the better;" "it is a good discipline forthem to practise self-denial, " &c. But the yoke that they _must_ bear, inspite of our lightening it all we can, is heavy enough; the instances inwhich it is, for good and sufficient reasons, impossible for them to havetheir own way are quite numerous enough to insure their learning thelesson very early; and as for the discipline of self-denial, --God blesstheir dear, patient souls!--if men and women brought to bear on thethwartings and vexations of their daily lives, and their relations witheach other, one hundredth part of the sweet acquiescence and braveendurance which average children show, under the average management ofaverage parents, this world would be a much pleasanter place to live inthan it is. 

Let any conscientious and tender mother, who perhaps reads these wordswith tears half of resentment, half of grief in her eyes, keep for threedays an exact record of the little requests which she refuses, from thebaby of five, who begged to stand on a chair and look out of the window, and was hastily told, "No, it would, hurt the chair, " when one minutewould have been enough time to lay a folded newspaper over theupholstery, and another minute enough to explain to him, with a kiss anda hug, "that that was to save his spoiling mamma's nice chair with hisboots;" and the two minutes together would probably have made sure thatanother time the dear little fellow would look out for a paper himself, when he wished to climb up to the window, --from this baby up to the prettygirl of twelve, who, with as distinct a perception of the becoming as hermother had before her, went to school unhappy because she was compelled towear the blue necktie instead of the scarlet one, and surely for noespecial reason! At the end of the three days, an honest examination ofthe record would show that full half of these small denials, all of whichhad involved pain, and some of which had brought contest and punishment, had been needless, had been hastily made, and made usually on account ofthe slight interruption or inconvenience which would result from yieldingto the request. I am very much mistaken if the honest keeping and honeststudy of such a three days' record would not wholly change the atmospherein many a house to what it ought to be, and bring almost constant sunshineand bliss where now, too often, are storm and misery. 

With some parents, although they are neither harsh nor hard in manner, noryet unloving in nature, the habitual first impulse seems to be to refuse:they appear to have a singular obtuseness to the fact that it is, or canbe, of any consequence to a child whether it does or does not do the thingit desires. Often the refusal is withdrawn on the first symptom of griefor disappointment on the child's part; a thing which is fatal to all realcontrol of a child, and almost as unkind as the first unnecessarydenial, --perhaps even more so, as it involves double and treble pains, infuture instances, where there cannot and must not be any giving way toentreaties. It is doubtless this lack of perception, --akin, one wouldthink, to color-blindness, --which is at the bottom of this great andcommon inhumanity among kind and intelligent fathers and mothers: aninhumanity so common that it may almost be said to be universal; so commonthat, while we are obliged to look on and see our dearest friends guiltyof it, we find it next to impossible to make them understand what we meanwhen we make outcry over some of its glaring instances. 

You, my dearest of friends, --or, rather, you who would be, but for thisone point of hopeless contention between us, --do you remember a certainwarm morning, last August, of which I told you then you had not heard thelast? Here it is again: perhaps in print I can make it look blacker to youthan I could then; part of it I saw, part of it you unwillingly confessedto me, and part of it little Blue Eyes told me herself. 

It was one of those ineffable mornings, when a thrill of delight andexpectancy fills the air; one felt that every appointment of the day mustbe unlike those of other days, --must be festive, must help on the "whiteday" for which all things looked ready. I remember how like the morningitself you looked as you stood in the doorway, in a fresh white muslindress, with lavender ribbons. I said, "Oh, extravagance! For breakfast!"

"I know, " you said; "but the day was so enchanting, I could not make up mymind to wear any thing that had been worn before. " Here an uproar from thenursery broke out, and we both ran to the spot. There stood little BlueEyes, in a storm of temper, with one small foot on a crumpled mass of pinkcambric on the floor; and nurse, who was also very red and angry, explained that Miss would not have on her pink frock because it was notquite clean. "It is all dirty, mamma, and I don't want to put it on!You've got on a nice white dress: why can't I?"

You are in the main a kind mother, and you do not like to give little BlueEyes pain; so you knelt down beside her, and told her that she must be agood girl, and have on the gown Mary had said, but that she should have ona pretty white apron, which would hide the spots. And Blue Eyes, beingonly six years old, and of a loving, generous nature, dried her tears, accepted the very questionable expedient, tried to forget the spots, andin a few moments came out on the piazza, chirping like a little bird. Bythis time the rare quality of the morning had stolen like wine into ourbrains, and you exclaimed, "We will have breakfast out here, under thevines! How George will like it!" And in another instant you were flittingback and forth, helping the rather ungracious Bridget move out thebreakfast-table, with its tempting array. 

"Oh, mamma, mamma, " cried Blue Eyes, "can't I have my little tea-set on alittle table beside your big table? Oh, let me, let me!" and she fairlyquivered with excitement. You hesitated. How I watched you! But it was alittle late. Bridget was already rather cross; the tea-set was packed in abox, and up on a high shelf. 

"No, dear. There is not time, and we must not make Bridget any moretrouble; but"--seeing the tears coming again--"you shall have some realtea in papa's big gilt cup, and another time you shall have your tea-setwhen we have breakfast out here again. " As I said before, you are a kindmother, and you made the denial as easy to be borne as you could, and BlueEyes was again pacified, not satisfied, only bravely making the best ofit. And so we had our breakfast; a breakfast to be remembered, too. But asfor the "other time" which you had promised to Blue Eyes; how well I knewthat not many times a year did such mornings and breakfasts come, and thatit was well she would forget all about it! After breakfast, --you rememberhow we lingered, --George suddenly started up, saying, "How hard it is togo to town! I say, girls, walk down to the station with me, both of you. "

"And me too, me too, papa!" said Blue Eyes. You did not hear her; but Idid, and she had flown for her hat. At the door we found her, sayingagain, "Me too, mamma!" Then you remembered her boots: "Oh, my darling, "you said, kissing her, for you are a kind mother, "you cannot go in thosenice boots: the dew will spoil them; and it is not worth while to changethem, we shall be back in a few minutes. "

A storm of tears would have burst out in an instant at this the thirddisappointment, if I had not sat down on the door-step, and, taking her inmy lap, whispered that auntie was going to stay too. 

"Oh, put the child down, and come along, " called the great, strong, uncomprehending man--Blue Eyes' dear papa. "Pussy won't mind. Be a goodgirl, pussy; I'll bring you a red balloon to-night. "

You are both very kind, you and George, and you both love little Blue Eyesdearly. 

"No, I won't come. I believe my boots are too thin, " said I; and for theequivocation there was in my reply I am sure of being forgiven. You bothturned back twice to look at the child, and kissed your hands to her; andI wondered if you did not see in her face, what I did, real grief andpatient endurance. Even "The King of the Golden River" did not rouse her:she did not want a story; she did not want me; she did not want a redballoon at night; she wanted to walk between you, to the station, with herlittle hands in yours! God grant the day may not come when you will beheart-broken because you can never lead her any more!

She asked me some questions, while you were gone, which you remember Irepeated to you. She asked me if I did not hate nice new shoes; and whylittle girls could not put on the dresses they liked best; and if mammadid not look beautiful in that pretty white dress; and said that, if shecould only have had her own tea-set, at breakfast, she would have let mehave my coffee in one of her cups. Gradually she grew happier, and beganto tell me about her great wax-doll, which had eyes that could shut; whichwas kept in a trunk because she was too little, mamma said, to play verymuch with it now; but she guessed mamma would let her have it to-day; didI not think so? Alas! I did, and I said so; in fact, I felt sure that itwas the very thing you would be certain to do, to sweeten the day, whichhad begun so sadly for poor little Blue Eyes. 

It seemed very long to her before you came back, and she was on the pointof asking for her dolly as soon as you appeared; but I whispered to her towait till you were rested. After a few minutes I took her up to yourroom, --that lovely room with the bay window to the east; there you sat, inyour white dress, surrounded with gay worsteds, all looking like acarnival of humming-birds. "Oh, how beautiful!" I exclaimed, ininvoluntary admiration; "what are you doing?" You said that you were goingto make an affghan, and that the morning was so enchanting you could notbear the thought of touching your mending, but were going to luxuriate inthe worsteds. Some time passed in sorting the colors, and deciding on thecontrasts, and I forgot all about the doll. Not so little Blue Eyes. Iremembered afterward how patiently she stood still, waiting and waitingfor a gap between our words, that she need not break the law againstinterrupting, with her eager--

"Please, mamma, let me have my wax dolly to play with this morning! I'llsit right here on the floor, by you and auntie, and not hurt her one bit. Oh, please do, mamma!"

You mean always to be a very kind mother, and you spoke as gently andlovingly as it is possible to speak when you replied:--

"Oh, Pussy, mamma is too busy to get it; she can't get up now. You canplay with your blocks, and with your other dollies, just as well; that's agood little girl. "

Probably, if Blue Eyes had gone on imploring, you would have laid yourworsteds down, and given her the dolly; for you love her dearly, and nevermean to make her unhappy. But neither you nor I were prepared for whatfollowed. 

"You're a naughty, ugly, hateful mamma! You never let me do _any_ thing, and I wish you were dead!" with such a burst of screaming and tears thatwe were both frightened. You looked, as well you might, heart-broken atsuch words from your only child. You took her away; and when you cameback, you cried, and said you had whipped her severely, and you did notknow what you should do with a child of such a frightful temper. 

"Such an outburst as that, just because I told her, in the gentlest waypossible, that she could not have a plaything! It is terrible!"

Then I said some words to you, which you thought were unjust. I asked youin what condition your own nerves would have been by ten o'clock thatmorning if your husband (who had, in one view, a much better right tothwart your harmless desires than you had to thwart your child's, sinceyou, in the full understanding of maturity, gave yourself into his hands)had, instead of admiring your pretty white dress, told you to be moreprudent, and not put it on; had told you it would be nonsense to havebreakfast out on the piazza; and that he could not wait for you to walk tothe station with him. You said that the cases were not at all parallel;and I replied hotly that that was very true, for those matters would havebeen to you only the comparative trifles of one short day, and would havemade you only a little cross and uncomfortable; whereas to little BlueEyes they were the all-absorbing desires of the hour, which, to a child introuble, always looks as if it could never come to an end, and would neverbe followed by any thing better. 

Blue Eyes cried herself to sleep, and slept heavily till late in theafternoon. When her father came home, you said that she must not have thered balloon, because she had been such a naughty girl. I have wonderedmany times since why she did not cry again, or look grieved when you saidthat, and laid the balloon away. After eleven o'clock at night, I went tolook at her, and found her sobbing in her sleep, and tossing about. Igroaned as I thought, "This is only one day, and there are three hundredand sixty-five in a year!" But I never recall the distorted face of thatpoor child, as, in her fearful passion, she told you she wished you weredead, without also remembering that even the gentle Christ said of him whoshould offend one of these little ones, "It were better for him that amill-stone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depthsof the sea!"

The Inhumanities of Parents--Rudeness. 

/# "_Inhumanity_--Cruelty. _Cruelty_--The disposition to give unnecessary pain. "--_Webster's Dict_. #/

I had intended to put third on the list of inhumanities of parents"needless requisitions;" but my last summer's observations changed myestimate, and convinced me that children suffer more pain from therudeness with which they are treated than from being forced to do needlessthings which they dislike. Indeed, a positively and graciously courteousmanner toward children is a thing so rarely seen in average daily life, the rudenesses which they receive are so innumerable, that it is hard totell where to begin in setting forth the evil. Children themselves oftenbring their sharp and unexpected logic to bear on some incidentillustrating the difference in this matter of behavior between what isrequired from them and what is shown to them: as did a little boy I knew, whose father said crossly to him one morning, as he came into thebreakfast-room, "Will you ever learn to shut that door after you?" and afew seconds later, as the child was rather sulkily sitting down in hischair, "And do you mean to bid anybody 'good-morning, ' or not?" "I don'tthink you gave _me_ a very nice 'good-morning, ' anyhow, " replied satiricaljustice, aged seven. Then, of course, he was reproved for speakingdisrespectfully; and so in the space of three minutes the beautifulopening of the new day, for both parents and children, was jarred androbbed of its fresh harmony by the father's thoughtless rudeness. 

Was the breakfast-room door much more likely to be shut the next morning?No. The lesson was pushed aside by the pain, the motive to resolve wasdulled by the antagonism. If that father had called his son, and, puttinghis arm round him, (oh! the blessed and magic virtue of putting your armround a child's neck!) had said, "Good-morning, my little man;" and then, in a confidential whisper in his ear, "What shall we do to make thisforgetful little boy remember not to leave that door open, through whichthe cold wind blows in on all of us?"--can any words measure thedifference between the first treatment and the second? between the successof the one and the failure of the other?

Scores of times in a day, a child is told, in a short, authoritative way, to do or not to do such little things as we ask at the hands of olderpeople, as favors, graciously, and with deference to their choice. "Wouldyou be so very kind as to close that window?" "May I trouble you for thatcricket?" "If you would be as comfortable in this chair as in that, Iwould like to change places with you. " "Oh, excuse me, but your head isbetween me and the light: could you see as well if you moved a little?""Would it hinder you too long to stop at the store for me? I would be verymuch obliged to you, if you would. " "Pray, do not let me crowd you, " &c. In most people's speech to children, we find, as synonyms for these politephrases: "Shut that window down, this minute. " "Bring me that cricket. " "Iwant that chair; get up. You can sit in this. " "Don't you see that you areright in my light? Move along. " "I want you to leave off playing, and goright down to the store for me. " "Don't crowd so. Can't you see that thereis not room enough for two people here?" and so on. As I write, I feel aninstinctive consciousness that these sentences will come like home-thruststo some surprised people. I hope so. That is what I want. I am sure thatin more than half the cases where family life is marred in peace, andalmost stripped of beauty, by just these little rudenesses, the parentsare utterly unconscious of them. The truth is, it has become like anestablished custom, this different and less courteous way of speaking tochildren on small occasions and minor matters. People who are generallycivil and of fair kindliness do it habitually, not only to their ownchildren, but to all children. We see it in the cars, in the stages, instores, in Sunday schools, everywhere. 

On the other hand, let a child ask for any thing without saying "please, "receive any thing without saying "thank you, " sit still in the mostcomfortable seat without offering to give it up, or press its ownpreference for a particular book, chair, or apple, to the inconveniencingof an elder, and what an outcry we have: "Such rudeness!" "Such anill-mannered child!" "His parents must have neglected him strangely. " Notat all: they have been steadily telling him a great many times every daynot to do these precise things which you dislike. But they themselves havebeen all the while doing those very things to him; and there is no proverbwhich strikes a truer balance between two things than the old one whichweighs example over against precept. 

However, that it is bad policy to be rude to children is the least of thethings to be said against it. Over this they will triumph, sooner orlater. The average healthy child has a native bias towards gracious goodbehavior and kindly affections. He will win and be won in the long run, and, the chances are, have better manners than his father. But the painthat we give these blessed little ones when we wound theirtenderness, --for that there is no atoning. Over that they can nevertriumph, either now or hereafter. Why do we dare to be so sure that theyare not grieved by ungracious words and tones? that they can get used tobeing continually treated as if they were "in the way"? Who has not heardthis said? I have, until I have longed for an Elijah and for fire, thatthe grown-up cumberers of the ground, who are the ones really in the way, might be burned up, to make room for the children. I believe that, if itwere possible to count up in any one month, and show in the aggregate, allof this class of miseries borne by children, the world would cry outastonished. I know a little girl, ten years old, of nervous temperament, whose whole physical condition is disordered, and seriously, by hermother's habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding. She is a sickly, fretful, unhappy, almost unbearable child. If she lives to grow up, shewill be a sickly, fretful, unhappy, unlovely woman. But her mother is justas much responsible for the whole as if she had deranged her system byfeeding her on poisonous drugs. Yet she is a most conscientious, devoted, and anxious mother, and, in spite of this manner, a loving one. She doesnot know that there is any better way than hers. She does not see that herchild is mortified and harmed when she says to her, in the presence ofstrangers, "How do you suppose you _look_ with your mouth open like that?""Do you want me to show you how you are sitting?"--and then a grotesqueimitation of her stooping shoulders. "_Will_ you sit still for oneminute?" "_Do_ take your hands off my dress. " "Was there ever such anawkward child?" When the child replies fretfully and disagreeably, shedoes not see that it is only an exact reflection of her own voice andmanners. She does not understand any of the things that would make for herown peace, as well as for the child's. Matters grow worse, instead ofbetter, as the child grows older and has more will; and the chances arethat the poor little soul will be worried into her grave. 

Probably most parents, even very kindly ones, would be a little startledat the assertion that a child ought never to be reproved in the presenceof others. This is so constant an occurrence that nobody thinks ofnoticing it; nobody thinks of considering whether it be right and best, ornot. But it is a great rudeness to a child. I am entirely sure that itought never to be done. Mortification is a condition as unwholesome as itis uncomfortable. When the wound is inflicted by the hand of a parent, itis all the more certain to rankle and do harm. Let a child see that hismother is so anxious that he should have the approbation and good-will ofher friends that she will not call their attention to his faults; andthat, while she never, under any circumstances, allows herself to forgetto tell him afterward, alone, if he has behaved improperly, she will sparehim the additional pain and mortification of public reproof; and, whilethat child will lay these secret reproofs to heart, he will still behappy. 

I know a mother who had the insight to see this, and the patience to makeit a rule; for it takes far more patience, far more time, than the commonmethod. 

She said sometimes to her little boy, after visitors had left the parlor, "Now, dear, I am going to be your little girl, and you are to be my papa. And we will play that a gentleman has just come in to see you, and I willshow you exactly how you have been behaving while this lady has beencalling to see me. And you can see if you do not feel very sorry to haveyour little girl behave so. "

Here is a dramatic representation at once which that boy does not need tosee repeated many times before he is forever cured of interrupting, ofpulling his mother's gown, of drumming on the piano, &c. , --of the thousandand one things which able-bodied children can do to make social visitingwhere they are a martyrdom and a penance. 

Once I saw this same little boy behave so boisterously and rudely at thedinner-table, in the presence of guests, that I said to myself, "Surely, this time she will have to break her rule, and reprove him publicly. " Isaw several telegraphic signals of rebuke, entreaty, and warning flashfrom her gentle eyes to his; but nothing did any good. Nature was too muchfor him; he could not at that minute force himself to be quiet. Presentlyshe said, in a perfectly easy and natural tone, "Oh, Charley, come here aminute; I want to tell you something. " No one at the table supposed thatit had any thing to do with his bad behavior. She did not intend that theyshould. As she whispered to him, I alone saw his cheek flush, and that helooked quickly and imploringly into her face; I alone saw that tears werealmost in her eyes. But she shook her head, and he went back to his seatwith a manful but very red little face. In a few moments he laid down hisknife and fork, and said, "Mamma, will you please to excuse me?""Certainly, my dear, " said she. Nobody but I understood it, or observedthat the little fellow had to run very fast to get out of the room withoutcrying. Afterward she told me that she never sent a child away from thetable in any other way. "But what would you do, " said I, "if he were torefuse to ask to be excused?" Then the tears stood full in her eyes. "Doyou think he could, " she replied, "when he sees that I am only trying tosave him from pain?" In the evening, Charley sat in my lap, and was verysober. At last he whispered to me, "I'll tell you an awful secret, if youwon't tell. Did you think I had done my dinner this afternoon when I gotexcused? Well, I hadn't. Mamma made me, because I acted so. That's the wayshe always does. But I haven't had to have it done to me before for everso long, --not since I was a little fellow" (he was eight now); "and Idon't believe I ever shall again till I'm a man. " Then he added, reflectively, "Mary brought me all the rest of my dinner upstairs; but Iwouldn't touch it, only a little bit of the ice-cream. I don't think Ideserved any at all; do you?"

I shall never, so long as I live, forget a lesson of this sort which myown mother once gave me. I was not more than seven years old; but I had agreat susceptibility to color and shape in clothes, and an insatiableadmiration for all people who came finely dressed. One day, my mother saidto me, "Now I will play 'house' with you. " Who does not remember when to"play house" was their chief of plays? And to whose later thought has itnot occurred that in this mimic little show lay bound up the whole oflife? My mother was the liveliest of playmates, she took the worst doll, the broken tea-set, the shabby furniture, and the least convenient cornerof the room for her establishment. Social life became a round offestivities when she kept house as my opposite neighbor. At last, afterthe washing-day, and the baking-day, and the day when she took dinner withme, and the day when we took our children and walked out together, camethe day for me to take my oldest child and go across to make a call at herhouse. Chill discomfort struck me on the very threshold of my visit. Wherewas the genial, laughing, talking lady who had been my friend up to thatmoment? There she sat, stock-still, dumb, staring first at my bonnet, thenat my shawl, then at my gown, then at my feet; up and down, down and up, she scanned me, barely replying in monosyllables to my attempts atconversation; finally getting up, and coming nearer, and examining myclothes, and my child's still more closely. A very few minutes of thiswere more than I could bear; and, almost crying, I said, "Why, mamma, whatmakes you do so?" Then the play was over; and she was once more the wiseand tender mother, telling me playfully that it was precisely in such away I had stared, the day before, at the clothes of two ladies who hadcome in to visit her. I never needed that lesson again. To this day, if Ifind myself departing from it for an instant, the old tingling shame burnsin my cheeks. 

To this day, also, the old tingling pain burns my cheeks as I recallcertain rude and contemptuous words which were said to me when I was veryyoung, and stamped on my memory forever. I was once called a "stupidchild" in the presence of strangers. I had brought the wrong book from myfather's study. Nothing could be said to me to-day which would give me atenth part of the hopeless sense of degradation which came from thosewords. Another time, on the arrival of an unexpected guest to dinner, Iwas sent, in a great hurry, away from the table, to make room, with theremark that "it was not of the least consequence about the child; shecould just as well have her dinner afterward. " "The child" would have beenonly too happy to help on the hospitality of the sudden emergency, if thething had been differently put; but the sting of having it put in that wayI never forgot. Yet in both these instances the rudeness was so small, incomparison with what we habitually see, that it would be too trivial tomention, except for the bearing of the fact that the pain it gave haslasted till now. 

When we consider seriously what ought to be the nature of a reproof from aparent to a child, and what is its end, the answer is simple enough. Itshould be nothing but the superior wisdom and strength, explaining toinexperience and feebleness wherein they have made a mistake, to the endthat they may avoid such mistakes in future. If personal annoyance, impatience, antagonism enter in, the relation is marred and the endendangered. Most sacred and inalienable of all rights is the right ofhelplessness to protection from the strong, of ignorance to counsel fromthe wise. If we give our protection and counsel grudgingly, or in achurlish, unkind manner, even to the stranger that is in our gates, we areno Christians, and deserve to be stripped of what little wisdom andstrength we have hoarded. But there are no words to say what we are orwhat we deserve if we do thus to the little children whom we have dared, for our own pleasure, to bring into the perils of this life, and whosewhole future may be blighted by the mistakes of our careless hands. 

Breaking the Will. 

This phrase is going out of use. It is high time it did. If the thing itrepresents would also cease, there would be stronger and freer men andwomen. But the phrase is still sometimes heard; and there are stillconscientious fathers and mothers who believe they do God service insetting about the thing. 

I have more than once said to a parent who used these words, "Will youtell me just what you mean by that? Of course you do not mean exactly whatyou say. "

"Yes, I do. I mean that the child's will is to be once for allbroken!--that he is to learn that my will is to be his law. The sooner helearns this the better. "

"But is it to your will simply _as_ will that he is to yield? Simply asthe weaker yields to the stronger, --almost as matter yields to force? Forwhat reason is he to do this?"

"Why, because I know what is best for him, and what is right; and he doesnot. "

"Ah! that is a very different thing. He is, then, to do the thing that youtell him to do, because that thing is right and is needful for him; youare his guide on a road over which you have gone, and he has not; you arean interpreter, a helper; you know better than he does about all things, and your knowledge is to teach his ignorance. "

"Certainly, that is what I mean. A pretty state of things it would be ifchildren were to be allowed to think they know as much as their parents. There is no way except to break their wills in the beginning. "

"But you have just said that it is not to your will as will that he is toyield, but to your superior knowledge and experience. That surely is not'breaking his will. ' It is of all things furthest removed from it. It iseducating his will. It is teaching him how to will. "

This sounds dangerous; but the logic is not easily turned aside, and thereis little left for the advocate of will-breaking but to fall back on sometexts in the Bible, which have been so often misquoted in this connectionthat one can hardly hear them with patience. To "Children, obey yourparents, " was added "in the Lord, " and "because it is right, " not "becausethey are your parents. " "Spare the rod" has been quite gratuitouslyassumed to mean "spare blows. " "Rod" means here, as elsewhere, simplypunishment. We are not told to "train up a child" to have no will but ourown, but "in the way in which he should go, " and to the end that "when heis old" he should not "depart from it, "--i. E. , that his will should be soeducated that he will choose to walk in the right way still. Suppose achild's will to be actually "broken;" suppose him to be so trained that hehas no will but to obey his parents. What is to become of this helplessmachine, which has no central spring of independent action? Can we standby, each minute of each hour of each day, and say to the automata, Gohere, or Go there? Can we be sure of living as long as they live? Can wewind them up like seventy-year clocks, and leave them?

But this is idle. It is not, thank God, in the power of any man or anywoman to "break" a child's "will. " They may kill the child's body, intrying, like that still unhung clergyman in Western New York, who whippedhis three-year-old son to death for refusing to repeat a prayer to hisstep-mother. 

Bodies are frail things; there are more child-martyrs than will be knownuntil the bodies terrestrial are done with. 

But, by one escape or another, the will, the soul, goes free. Sooner orlater, every human being comes to know and prove in his own estate thatfreedom of will is the only freedom for which there are no chainspossible, and that in Nature's whole reign of law nothing is so largelyprovided for as liberty. Sooner or later, all this must come. But, if itcomes later, it comes through clouds of antagonism, and after days offight, and is hard-bought. 

It should come sooner, like the kingdom of God, which it is, --"withoutobservation, " gracious as sunshine, sweet as dew; it should begin with theinfant's first dawning of comprehension that there are two courses ofaction, two qualities of conduct: one wise, the other foolish; one right, the other wrong. 

I am sure; for I have seen, that a child's moral perceptions can be somade clear, and his will so made strong and upright, that before he is tenyears old he will see and take his way through all common days rightly andbravely. 

Will he always act up to his highest moral perceptions? No. Do we? But oneright decision that he makes voluntarily, unbiassed by the assertion ofauthority or the threat of punishment, is worth more to him in developmentof moral character than a thousand in which he simply does what he iscompelled to do by some sort of outside pressure. 

I read once, in a book intended for the guidance of mothers, a story of alittle child who, in repeating his letters one day, suddenly refused tosay A. All the other letters he repeated again and again, unhesitatingly;but A he would not, and persisted in declaring that he could not say. Hewas severely whipped, but still persisted. It now became a contest ofwills. He was whipped again and again and again. In the intervals betweenthe whippings the primer was presented to him, and he was told that hewould be whipped again if he did not mind his mother and say A. I forgethow many times he was whipped; but it was almost too many times to bebelieved. The fight was a terrible one. At last, in a paroxysm of hiscrying under the blows, the mother thought she heard him sob out "A, " andthe victory was considered to be won. 

A little boy whom I know once had a similar contest over a letter of thealphabet; but the contest was with himself, and his mother was thefaithful Great Heart who helped him through. The story is so remarkablethat I have long wanted all mothers to know it. It is as perfect anillustration of what I mean by "educating" the will as the other one is ofwhat is called "breaking" it. 

Willy was about four years old. He had a large, active brain, sensitivetemperament, and indomitable spirit. He was and is an uncommon child. Common methods of what is commonly supposed to be "discipline" would, ifhe had survived them, have made a very bad boy of him. He had greatdifficulty in pronouncing the letter G, --so much that he had formed almosta habit of omitting it. One day his mother said, not dreaming of anyspecial contest, "This time you must say G. " "It is an ugly old letter, and I ain't ever going to try to say it again, " said Willy, repeating thealphabet very rapidly from beginning to end, without the G. Like a wisemother, she did not open at once on a struggle; but said, pleasantly, "Ah!you did not get it in that time. Try again; go more slowly, and we willhave it. " It was all in vain; and it soon began to look more like realobstinacy on Willy's part than any thing she had ever seen in him. She hasoften told me how she hesitated before entering on the campaign. "I alwaysknew, " she said, "that Willy's first real fight with himself would be nomatter of a few hours; and it was a particularly inconvenient time for me, just then, to give up a day to it. But it seemed, on the whole, best notto put it off. "

So she said, "Now, Willy, you can't get along without the letter G. Thelonger you put off saying it, the harder it will be for you to say it atlast; and we will have it settled now, once for all. You are never goingto let a little bit of a letter like that be stronger than Willy. We willnot go out of this room till you have said it. "

Unfortunately, Willy's will had already taken its stand. However, themother made no authoritative demand that he should pronounce the letter asa matter of obedience to her. Because it was a thing intrinsicallynecessary for him to do, she would see, at any cost to herself or to him, that he did it; but he must do it voluntarily, and she would wait till hedid. 

The morning wore on. She busied herself with other matters, and left Willyto himself; now and then asking, with a smile, "Well, isn't my little boystronger than that ugly old letter yet?"

Willy was sulky. He understood in that early stage all that was involved. Dinner-time came. 

"Aren't you going to dinner, mamma?"

"Oh! no, dear; not unless you say G, so that you can go too. Mamma willstay by her little boy until he is out of this trouble. "

The dinner was brought up, and they ate it together. She was cheerful andkind, but so serious that he felt the constant pressure of her pain. 

The afternoon dragged slowly on to night. Willy cried now and then, andshe took him in her lap, and said, "Dear, you will be happy as soon as yousay that letter, and mamma will be happy too, and we can't either of us behappy until you do. "

"Oh, mamma! why don't you _make_ me say it?"

(This he said several times before the affair was over. )

"Because, dear, you must make yourself say it. I am helping you makeyourself say it, for I shall not let you go out of this room, nor go outmyself, till you do say it; but that is all I shall do to help you. I amlistening, listening all the time, and if you say it, in ever so little awhisper, I shall hear you. That is all mamma can do for you. "

Bed-time came. Willy went to bed, unkissed and sad. The next morning, whenWilly's mother opened her eyes, she saw Willy sitting up in his crib, andlooking at her steadfastly. As soon as he saw that she was awake, heexclaimed, "Mamma, I can't say it; and you know I can't say it. You're anaughty mamma, and you don't love me. " Her heart sank within her; but shepatiently went again and again over yesterday's ground. Willy cried. Heate very little breakfast. He stood at the window in a listless attitudeof discouraged misery, which she said cut her to the heart. Once in awhile he would ask for some plaything which he did not usually have. Shegave him whatever he asked for; but he could not play. She kept up anappearance of being busy with her sewing, but she was far more unhappythan Willy. 

Dinner was brought up to them. Willy said, "Mamma, this ain't a bit gooddinner. "

She replied, "Yes, it is, darling; just as good as we ever have. It isonly because we are eating it alone. And poor papa is sad, too, takinghis all alone downstairs. "

At this Willy burst out into an hysterical fit of crying and sobbing. 

"I shall never see my papa again in this world. "

Then his mother broke down, too, and cried as hard as he did; but shesaid, "Oh! yes, you will, dear. I think you will say that letter beforetea-time, and we will have a nice evening downstairs together. "

"I can't say it. I try all the time, and I can't say it; and, if you keepme here till I die, I shan't ever say it. "

The second night settled down dark and gloomy, and Willy cried himself tosleep. His mother was ill from anxiety and confinement; but she neverfaltered. She told me she resolved that night that, if it were necessary, she would stay in that room with Willy a month. The next morning she saidto him, more seriously than before, "Now, Willy, you are not only afoolish little boy, you are unkind; you are making everybody unhappy. Mamma is very sorry for you, but she is also very much displeased withyou. Mamma will stay here with you till you say that letter, if it is forthe rest of your life; but mamma will not talk with you, as she didyesterday. She tried all day yesterday to help you, and you would not helpyourself; to-day you must do it all alone. "

"Mamma, are you sure I shall ever say it?" asked Willy. 

"Yes, dear; perfectly sure. You will say it some day or other. "

"Do you think I shall say it to-day?"

"I can't tell. You are not so strong a little boy as I thought. I believedyou would say it yesterday. I am afraid you have some hard work beforeyou. "

Willy begged her to go down and leave him alone. Then he begged her toshut him up in the closet, and "see if that wouldn't make him good. " Everyfew minutes he would come and stand before her, and say very earnestly, "Are you sure I shall say it?"

He looked very pale, almost as if he had had a fit of illness. No wonder. It was the whole battle of life fought at the age of four. 

It was late in the afternoon of this the third day. Willy had been sittingin his little chair, looking steadily at the floor, for so long a timethat his mother was almost frightened. But she hesitated to speak to him, for she felt that the crisis had come. Suddenly he sprang up, and walkedtoward her with all the deliberate firmness of a man in his whole bearing. She says there was something in his face which she has never seen since, and does not expect to see till he is thirty years old. 

"Mamma!" said he. 

"Well, dear?" said his mother, trembling so that she could hardly speak. 

"Mamma, " he repeated, in a loud, sharp tone, "G! G! G! G!" And then heburst into a fit of crying, which she had hard work to stop. It was over. 

Willy is now ten years old. From that day to this his mother has never hada contest with him; she has always been able to leave all practicalquestions affecting his behavior to his own decision, merely saying, "Willy, I think this or that will be better. "

His self-control and gentleness are wonderful to see; and the blending inhis face of childlike simplicity and purity with manly strength issomething which I have only once seen equalled. 

For a few days he went about the house, shouting "G! G! G!" at the top ofhis voice. He was heard asking playmates if they could "say G, " and "whoshowed them how. " For several years he used often to allude to the affair, saying, "Do you remember, mamma, that dreadful time when I wouldn't sayG?" He always used the verb "wouldn't" in speaking of it. Once, when hewas sick, he said, "Mamma, do you think I could have said G any soonerthan I did?"

"I have never felt certain about that, Willy, " she said. "What do _you_think?"

"I think I could have said it a few minutes sooner. I was saying it to_myself_ as long as that!" said Willy. 

It was singular that, although up to that time he had never been able topronounce the letter with any distinctness, when he first made up his mindin this instance to say it, he enunciated it with perfect clearness, andnever again went back to the old, imperfect pronunciation. 

Few mothers, perhaps, would be able to give up two whole days to such abattle as this; other children, other duties, would interfere. But thesame principle could be carried out without the mother's remainingherself by the child's side all the time. Moreover, not one child in athousand would hold out as Willy did. In all ordinary cases a few hourswould suffice. And, after all, what would the sacrifice of even two daysbe, in comparison with the time saved in years to come? If there were nostronger motive than one of policy, of desire to take the course easiestto themselves, mothers might well resolve that their first aim should beto educate their children's wills and make them strong, instead of toconquer and "break" them. 

The Reign of Archelaus. 

Herod's massacre had, after all, a certain mercy in it: there were nolingering tortures. The slayers of children went about with naked andbloody swords, which mothers could see, and might at least make effort toflee from. Into Rachel's refusal to be comforted there need enter nobitter agonies of remorse. But Herod's death, it seems, did not make Judeaa safe place for babies. When Joseph "heard that Archelaus did reign inthe room of his father, Herod, he was afraid to return thither with theinfant Jesus, " and only after repeated commands and warnings from Godwould he venture as far as Nazareth. The reign of Archelaus is not yetover; he has had many names, and ruled over more and more countries, butthe spirit of his father, Herod, is still in him. To-day his power is atits zenith. He is called Education; and the safest place for the dear, holy children is still Egypt, or some other of the fortunate countriescalled unenlightened. 

Some years ago there were symptoms of a strong rebellion against histyranny. Horace Mann lifted up his strong hands and voice against it;physicians and physiologists came out gravely and earnestly, and fortifiedtheir positions with statistics from which there was no appeal. ThomasWentworth Higginson, whose words have with the light, graceful beauty ofthe Damascus blade its swift sureness in cleaving to the heart of things, wrote an article for the "Atlantic Monthly" called "The Murder of theInnocents, " which we wish could be put into every house in the UnitedStates. Some changes in school organizations resulted from these protests;in the matter of ventilation of school-rooms some real improvement wasprobably effected; though we shudder to think how much room remains forfurther improvement, when we read in the report of the superintendent ofpublic schools in Brooklyn that in the primary departments of the grammarschools "an average daily number of 33, 275 pupils are crowded intoone-half the space provided in the upper departments for an average dailyattendance of 26, 359; or compelled to occupy badly lighted, inconvenient, and ill-ventilated galleries, or rooms in the basement stories. "

But in regard to the number of hours of confinement, and amount of studyrequired of children, it is hard to believe that schools have ever beenmuch more murderously exacting than now. 

The substitution of the single session of five hours for the oldarrangement of two sessions of three hours each, with a two-hours intervalat noon, was regarded as a great gain. So it would be, if all thebrain-work of the day were done in that time; but in most schools withthe five-hours session, there is next to no provision for studying inschool-hours, and the pupils are required to learn two, three, or fourlessons at home. Now, when is your boy to learn these lessons? Not in themorning, before school; that is plain. School ends at two. Few childrenlive sufficiently near their schools to get home to dinner before halfpast two o'clock. We say nothing of the undesirableness of taking thehearty meal of the day immediately after five hours of mental fatigue; itis probably a less evil than the late dinner at six, and we are in aregion where we are grateful for _less_ evils! Dinner is over at quarterpast three; we make close estimates. In winter there is left less than twohours before dark. This is all the time the child is to have for out-doorplay; two hours and a half (counting in his recess) out of twenty-four. Ask any farmer, even the stupidest, how well his colt or his lamb wouldgrow if it had but two hours a day of absolute freedom and exercise in theopen air, and that in the dark and the chill of a late afternoon! In spiteof the dark and the chill, however, your boy skates or slides on until heis called in by you, who, if you are an American mother, care a great dealmore than he does for the bad marks which will stand on his week's reportif those three lessons are not learned before bed-time. He is tired andcold; he does not want to study--who would? It is six o'clock before he isfairly at it. You work harder than he does, and in half an hour one lessonis learned; then comes tea. After tea half an hour, or perhaps an hour, remains before bed-time; in this time, which ought to be spent in light, cheerful talk or play, the rest of the lessons must be learned. He issleepy and discouraged. Words which in the freshness of the morning hewould have learned in a very few moments with ease, it is now simply outof his power to commit to memory. You, if you are not superhuman, growimpatient. At eight o'clock he goes to bed, his brain excited and wearied, in no condition for healthful sleep; and his heart oppressed with the fearof "missing" in the next day's recitations. And this is one out of theschool-year's two hundred and sixteen days--all of which will be likethis, or worse. One of the most pitiful sights we have seen for months wasa little group of four dear children, gathered round the library lamp, trying to learn the next day's lessons in time to have a story read tothem before going to bed. They had taken the precaution to learn onelesson immediately after dinner, before going out, cutting their out-doorplay down by half an hour. The two elder were learning a longspelling-lesson; the third was grappling with geographical definitions ofcapes, promontories, and so forth; and the youngest was at work on hisprimer. In spite of all their efforts, bed-time came before the lessonswere learned. The little geography student had been nodding over her bookfor some minutes, and she had the philosophy to say, "I don't care; I'm sosleepy. I had rather go to bed than hear any kind of a story. " But theelder ones were grieved and unhappy, and said, "There won't _ever_ be anytime; we shall have just as much more to learn to-morrow night. " The nextmorning, however, there was a sight still more pitiful: the baby of seven, with a little bit of paper and a pencil, and three sums in addition to bedone, and the father vainly endeavoring, to explain them to him in thehurried moments before breakfast. It would be easy to show how fatal toall real mental development, how false to all Nature's laws of growth, such a system must be; but that belongs to another side of the question. We speak now simply of the effect of it on the body; and here we quotelargely from the admirable article of Col. Higginson's, above referred to. No stronger, more direct, more conclusive words can be written:--

"Sir Walter Scott, according to Carlyle, was the only perfectly healthyliterary man who ever lived. He gave it as his deliberate opinion, inconversation with Basil Hall, that five and a half hours form the limit ofhealthful mental labor for a mature person. 'This I reckon very good workfor a man, ' he said. 'I can very seldom work six hours a day. ' Supposinghis estimate to be correct, and five and a half hours the reasonable limitfor the day's work of a mature intellect, it is evident that even thismust be altogether too much for an immature one. 'To suppose the youthfulbrain, ' says the recent admirable report, by Dr. Ray, of the ProvidenceInsane Hospital, 'to be capable of an amount of work which is consideredan ample allowance to an adult brain is simply absurd. ' 'It would bewrong, therefore, to deduct less than a half-hour from Scott's estimate, for even the oldest pupils in our highest schools, leaving five hours asthe limit of real mental effort for them, and reducing this for allyounger pupils very much further. '

"But Scott is not the only authority in the case; let us ask thephysiologists. So said Horace Mann before us, in the days when theMassachusetts school system was in process of formation. He asked thephysicians in 1840, and in his report printed the answers of three of themost eminent. The late Dr. Woodward, of Worcester, promptly said thatchildren under eight should never be confined more than one hour at atime, nor more than four hours a day. 

"Dr. James Jackson, of Boston, allowed the children four hours schoolingin winter and five in summer, but only one hour at a time; and heartilyexpressed his detestation of giving young children lessons to learn athome. 

"Dr. S. G. Howe, reasoning elaborately on the whole subject, said thatchildren under eight years of age should never be confined more than halfan hour at a time; by following which rule, with long recesses, they canstudy four hours daily. Children between eight and fourteen should not beconfined more than three-quarters of an hour at a time, having the lastquarter of each hour for exercise on the play-ground. 

"Indeed, the one thing about which doctors do _not_ disagree is thedestructive effect of premature or excessive mental labor. I can quoteyou medical authority for and against every maxim of dietetics beyond thevery simplest; but I defy you to find one man who ever begged, borrowed, or stole the title of M. D. , and yet abused those two honorary letters byasserting under their cover that a child could safely study as much as aman, or that a man could safely study more than six hours a day. "

"The worst danger of it is that the moral is written at the end of thefable, not at the beginning. The organization in youth is so dangerouslyelastic that the result of these intellectual excesses is not seen untilyears after. When some young girl incurs spinal disease from some slightfall, which she ought not to have felt for an hour, or some business manbreaks down in the prime of his years from some trifling over-anxiety, which should have left no trace behind, the popular verdict may be'Mysterious Providence;' but the wiser observer sees the retribution forthe folly of those misspent days which enfeebled the childish constitutioninstead of ripening it. One of the most striking passages in the report ofDr. Ray, before mentioned, is that in which he explains that, 'thoughstudy at school is rarely the immediate cause of insanity, it is the mostfrequent of its ulterior causes, except hereditary tendencies. ' _Itdiminishes the conservative power of the animal economy to such a degreethat attacks of disease which otherwise would have passed off safelydestroy life almost before danger is anticipated_. "

It would be easy to multiply authorities on these points. It is hard tostop. But our limits forbid any thing like a full treatment of thesubject. Yet discussion on this question ought never to cease in the landuntil a reform is brought about. Teachers are to blame only in part forthe present wrong state of things. They are to blame for yielding, foracquiescing; but the real blame rests on parents. Here and there, individual fathers and mothers, taught, perhaps, by heart-rendingexperience, try to make stand against the current of false ambitions andunhealthy standards. But these are rare exceptions. Parents, as a class, not only help on, but create the pressure to which teachers yield, andchildren are sacrificed. The whole responsibility is really theirs. Theyhave in their hands the power to regulate the whole school routine towhich their children are to be subjected. This is plain, when we onceconsider what would be the immediate effect in any community, large orsmall, if a majority of parents took action together, and persistentlyrefused to allow any child under fourteen to be confined in school morethan four hours out of the twenty-four, more than one hour at a time, orto do more than five hours' brain-work in a day. The law of supply anddemand is a first principle. In three months the schools in that communitywould be entirely reorganized, to accord with the parents' wishes; inthree years the improved average health of the children in that communitywould bear its own witness in ruddy bloom along the streets; and perhapseven in one generation so great gain of vigor might be made that themelancholy statistics of burial would no longer have to record the deathunder twelve years of age of more than two-fifths of the children who areborn. 

The Awkward Age. 

The expression defines itself. At the first sound of the words, we allthink of some one unhappy soul we know just now, whom they suggest. Nobodyis ever without at least one brother, sister, cousin, or friend on hand, who is struggling through this social slough of despond; and nobody everwill be, so long as the world goes on taking it for granted that theslough is a necessity, and that the road must go through it. Nature nevermeant any such thing. Now and then she blunders or gets thwarted of herintent, and turns out a person who is awkward, hopelessly and foreverawkward; body and soul are clumsy together, and it is hard to fancy themtranslated to the spiritual world without too much elbow and ankle. However, these are rare cases, and come in under the law of variation. Butan awkward age, --a necessary crisis or stage of uncouthness, through whichall human beings must pass, --Nature was incapable of such a conception;law has no place for it; development does not know it; instinct revoltsfrom it; and man is the only animal who has been silly and wrong-headedenough to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy are so simple, so close at hand, that we have not seen them. The whole thing lies in anutshell. Where does this abnormal, uncomfortable period come in? Betweenchildhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to theother. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be for a few years anomalous creatures, must they? We might, perhaps, find a name for the individual in this condition as well as forthe condition. We must look to Du Chaillu for it, if we do; but it is tooserious a distress to make light of, even for a moment. We have all feltit, and we know how it feels; we all see it every day, and we know how itlooks. 

What is it which the child has and the adult loses, from the loss of whichcomes this total change of behavior? Or is it something which the adulthas and the child had not? It is both; and until the loss and the gain, the new and the old, are permanently separated and balanced, the awkwardage lasts. The child was overlooked, contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, insulted, whipped; not constantly, not often, --in many cases, thank God, very seldom. But the liability was there, and he knew it; he never forgotit, if you did. One burn is enough to make fire dreaded. The adult, oncefairly recognized as adult, is not overlooked, contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, insulted, whipped; at least, not with impunity. To thisgratifying freedom, these comfortable exemptions, when they are onceestablished in our belief, we adjust ourselves, and grow contentedlygood-mannered. To the other _régime_, while we were yet children, we alsosomewhat adjusted ourselves, were tolerably well behaved, and made thebest of it. But who could bear a mixture of both? What genius could risesuperior to it, could be itself, surrounded by such uncertainties?

No wonder that your son comes into the room with a confused expression ofuncomfortable pain on every feature, when he does not in the least knowwhether he will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a littleboy. No wonder he sits down in his chair with movements suggestive ofnothing but rheumatism and jack-knives, when he is thinking that perhapsthere may be some reason why he should not take that particular chair, andthat, if there is, he will be ordered up. 

No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stammers, and says foolishthings on being courteously spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she isafraid that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, and remembersthat day before yesterday she was told that children should be seen andnot heard. 

I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to look at fourteen asif she were twenty. At home, she was the shyest and most awkward ofcreatures; away from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed andcharming. She said to me, once, "Oh! I have such a splendid time away fromhome. I'm so tall, everybody thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civilto me. "

I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming temperament, and uncommontalent, who is to this day--and he is twenty-five years old--nervous andill at ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his own family. He hesitates, stammers, and never does justice to his thoughts. He saysthat he believes he shall never be free from this distress; he cannotescape from the recollections of the years between fourteen and twenty, during which he was so systematically snubbed that his mother's parlor wasto him worse than the chambers of the Inquisition. He knows that he is nowsure of courteous treatment; that his friends are all proud of him; butthe old cloud will never entirely disappear. Something has been lost whichcan never be regained. And the loss is not his alone, it is theirs too;they are all poorer for life, by reason of the unkind days which are gone. 

This, then, is the explanation of the awkward age. I am not afraid of anydissent from my definition of the source whence its misery springs. Everybody's consciousness bears witness. Everybody knows, in the bottom ofhis heart, that, however much may be said about the change of voice, thethinness of cheeks, the sharpness of arms, the sudden length in legs andlack of length in trousers and frocks, --all these had nothing to do withthe real misery. The real misery was simply and solely the horriblefeeling of not belonging anywhere; not knowing what a moment might bringforth in the way of treatment from others; never being sure which impulseit would be safer to follow, to retreat or to advance, to speak or to besilent, and often overwhelmed with unspeakable mortification at the rebuffof the one or the censure of the other. Oh! how dreadful it all was! Howdreadful it all is, even to remember! It would be malicious even to referto it, except to point out the cure. 

The cure is plain. It needs no experiment to test it. Merely to mention itought to be enough. If human beings are so awkward at this unhappy age, and so unhappy at this awkward age, simply because they do not knowwhether they are to be treated as children or as adults, suppose we make arule that children are always to be treated, in point of courtesy, as ifthey were adults? Then this awkward age--this period of transition from anatmosphere of, to say the least, negative rudeness to one of graciouspoliteness--disappears. There cannot be a crisis of readjustment of socialrelations: there is no possibility of such a feeling; it would be hard toexplain to a young person what it meant. Now and then we see a young manor young woman who has never known it. They are usually only children, andare commonly spoken of as wonders. I know such a boy to-day. At seventeenhe measures six feet in height; he has the feet and the hands of a stilllarger man; and he comes of a blood which had far more strength thangrace. But his manner is, and always has been, sweet, gentle, composed, --the very ideal of grave, tender, frank young manhood. Peoplesay, "How strange! He never seemed to have any awkward age at all. " Itwould have been stranger if he had. Neither his father nor his mother everdeparted for an instant, in their relations with him, from the laws ofcourtesy and kindliness of demeanor which governed their relations withothers. 

He knew but one atmosphere, and that a genial one, from his babyhood up;and in and of this atmosphere has grown up a sweet, strong, pure soul, forwhich the quiet, self-possessed manner is but the fitting garb. 

This is part of the kingdom that cometh unobserved. In this kingdom we areall to be kings and priests, if we choose; and all its ways arepleasantness. But we are not ready for it till we have become peaceableand easy to be entreated, and have learned to understand why it was thatone day, when Jesus called his disciples together, he set a little childin their midst. 

A Day with a Courteous Mother. 

During the whole of one of last summer's hottest days I had the goodfortune to be seated in a railway car near a mother and four children, whose relations with each other were so beautiful that the pleasure ofwatching them was quite enough to make one forget the discomforts of thejourney. 

It was plain that they were poor; their clothes were coarse and old, andhad been made by inexperienced hands. The mother's bonnet alone would havebeen enough to have condemned the whole party on any of the world'sthoroughfares. I remembered afterward, with shame, that I myself hadsmiled at the first sight of its antiquated ugliness; but her face was onewhich it gave you a sense of rest to look upon, --it was so earnest, tender, true, and strong. It had little comeliness of shape or color init, it was thin, and pale; she was not young; she had worked hard; she hadevidently been much ill; but I have seen few faces which gave me suchpleasure. I think that she was the wife of a poor clergyman; and I thinkthat clergyman must be one of the Lord's best watchmen of souls. Thechildren--two boys and two girls--were all under the age of twelve, andthe youngest could not speak plainly. They had had a rare treat; they hadbeen visiting the mountains, and they were talking over all the wondersthey had seen with a glow of enthusiastic delight which was to be envied. Only a word-for-word record would do justice to their conversation; nodescription could give any idea of it, --so free, so pleasant, so genial, no interruptions, no contradictions; and the mother's part borne all thewhile with such equal interest and eagerness that no one not seeing herface would dream that she was any other than an elder sister. In thecourse of the day there were many occasions when it was necessary for herto deny requests, and to ask services, especially from the eldest boy; butno young girl, anxious to please a lover, could have done either with amore tender courtesy. She had her reward; for no lover could have beenmore tender and manly than was this boy of twelve. Their lunch was simpleand scanty; but it had the grace of a royal banquet. At the last, themother produced with much glee three apples and an orange, of which thechildren had not known. All eyes fastened on the orange. It was evidentlya great rarity. I watched to see if this test would bring out selfishness. There was a little silence; just the shade of a cloud. The mother said, "How shall I divide this? There is one for each of you; and I shall bebest off of all, for I expect big tastes from each of you. "

"Oh, give Annie the orange. Annie loves oranges, " spoke out the oldestboy, with a sudden air of a conqueror, and at the same time taking thesmallest and worst apple himself. 

"Oh, yes, let Annie have the orange, " echoed the second boy, nine yearsold. 

"Yes, Annie may have the orange, because that is nicer than the apple, andshe is a lady, and her brothers are gentlemen, " said the mother, quietly. Then there was a merry contest as to who should feed the mother withlargest and most frequent mouthfuls; and so the feast went on. Then Anniepretended to want apple, and exchanged thin golden strips of orange forbites out of the cheeks of Baldwins; and, as I sat watching her intently, she suddenly fancied she saw longing in my face, and sprang over to me, holding out a quarter of her orange, and saying, "Don't you want a taste, too?" The mother smiled, understandingly, when I said, "No, I thank you, you dear, generous little girl; I don't care about oranges. "

At noon we had a tedious interval of waiting at a dreary station. We satfor two hours on a narrow platform, which the sun had scorched till itsmelt of heat. The oldest boy--the little lover--held the youngest child, and talked to her, while the tired mother closed her eyes and rested. Nowand then he looked over at her, and then back at the baby; and at last hesaid confidentially to me (for we had become fast friends by this time), "Isn't it funny, to think that I was ever so small as this baby? And papasays that then mamma was almost a little girl herself. "

The two other children were toiling up and down the banks of therailroad-track, picking ox-eye daisies, buttercups, and sorrel. Theyworked like beavers, and soon the bunches were almost too big for theirlittle hands. Then they came running to give them to their mother. "Ohdear, " thought I, "how that poor, tired woman will hate to open her eyes!and she never can take those great bunches of common, fading flowers, inaddition to all her bundles and bags. " I was mistaken. 

"Oh, thank you, my darlings! How kind you were! Poor, hot, tired littleflowers, how thirsty they look! If they will only try and keep alive tillwe get home, we will make them very happy in some water; won't we? And youshall put one bunch by papa's plate, and one by mine. "

Sweet and happy, the weary and flushed little children stood looking up inher face while she talked, their hearts thrilling with compassion for thedrooping flowers and with delight in the giving of their gift. Then shetook great trouble to get a string and tie up the flowers, and then thetrain came, and we were whirling along again. Soon it grew dark, andlittle Annie's head nodded. Then I heard the mother say to the oldest boy, "Dear, are you too tired to let little Annie put her head on your shoulderand take a nap? We shall get her home in much better case to see papa ifwe can manage to give her a little sleep. " How many boys of twelve hearsuch words as these from tired, overburdened mothers?

Soon came the city, the final station, with its bustle and noise. Ilingered to watch my happy family, hoping to see the father. "Why, papaisn't here!" exclaimed one disappointed little voice after another. "Nevermind, " said the mother, with a still deeper disappointment in her owntone; "perhaps he had to go to see some poor body who is sick. " In thehurry of picking up all the parcels, and the sleepy babies, the poordaisies and buttercups were left forgotten in a corner of the rack. Iwondered if the mother had not intended this. May I be forgiven for theinjustice! A few minutes after I passed the little group, standing stilljust outside the station, and heard the mother say, "Oh, my darlings, Ihave forgotten your pretty bouquets. I am so sorry! I wonder if I couldfind them if I went back. Will you all stand still and not stir from thisspot if I go?"

"Oh, mamma, don't go, don't go. We will get you some more. Don't go, "cried all the children. 

"Here are your flowers, madam, " said I. "I saw that you had forgottenthem, and I took them as mementoes of you and your sweet children. " Sheblushed and looked disconcerted. She was evidently unused to people, andshy with all but her children. However, she thanked me sweetly, andsaid, --

"I was very sorry about them. The children took such trouble to get them;and I think they will revive in water. They cannot be quite dead. "

"They will _never_ die!" said I, with an emphasis which went from my heartto hers. Then all her shyness fled. She knew me; and we shook hands, andsmiled into each other's eyes with the smile of kindred as we parted. 

As I followed on, I heard the two children, who were walking behind, saying to each other, "Wouldn't that have been too bad? Mamma liked themso much, and we never could have got so many all at once again. "

"Yes, we could, too, next summer, " said the boy, sturdily. 

They are sure of their "next summers, " I think, all six of thosesouls, --children, and mother, and father. They may never again gather somany ox-eye daisies and buttercups "all at once. " Perhaps some of thelittle hands have already picked their last flowers. Nevertheless, theirsummers are certain. To such souls as these, all trees, either here or inGod's larger country, are Trees of Life, with twelve manner of fruits andleaves for healing; and it is but little change from the summers here, whose suns burn and make weary, to the summers there, of which "the Lambis the light. "

Heaven bless them all, wherever they are. 

Children in Nova Scotia. 

Nova Scotia is a country of gracious surprises. Instead of the stoneswhich are what strangers chiefly expect at her hands, she gives us awealth of fertile meadows; instead of stormy waves breaking on a frowningcoast, she shows us smooth basins whose shores are soft and wooded to thewater's edge, and into which empty wonderful tidal rivers, whose courses, where the tide-water has flowed out, lie like curving bands of brightbrown satin among the green fields. She has no barrenness, nounsightliness, no poverty; everywhere beauty, everywhere riches. She isbiding her time. 

But most beautiful among her beauties, most wonderful among her wonders, are her children. During two weeks' travel in the provinces, I have beenconstantly more and more impressed by their superiority in appearance, size, and health to the children of the New England and Middle States. Inthe outset of our journey I was struck by it; along all the roadsides theylooked up, boys and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy-legged, such aswith us are seen only now and then. I did not, however, realize at firstthat this was the universal law of the land, and that it pointed tosomething more than climate as a cause. But the first school that I saw, _en masse_, gave a startling impetus to the train of observation andinference into which I was unconsciously falling. It was a Sunday schoolin the little town of Wolfville, which lies between the Gaspcreau andCornwallis rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand Pré, where livedGabriel Lajeunesse, and Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the"simple Acadian farmers. "

"Mists from the mighty Atlantic" more than "looked on the happy valley"that Sunday morning. Convicting Longfellow of a mistake, they did descend"from their stations, " on solemn Blomidon, and fell in a slow, unpleasantdrizzle in the streets of Wolfville and Horton. I arrived too early at oneof the village churches, and while I was waiting for a sexton a dooropened, and out poured the Sunday school, whose services had just ended. On they came, dividing in the centre, and falling to the right and leftabout me, thirty or forty boys and girls, between the ages of seven andfifteen. I looked at them in astonishment. They all had fair skins, redcheeks, and clear eyes; they were all broad-shouldered, straight, andsturdy; the younger ones were more than sturdy, --they were fat, from theankles up. But perhaps the most noticeable thing of all was the quiet, sturdy, unharassed expression which their faces wore; a look which is thegreatest charm of a child's face, but which we rarely see in children overtwo or three years old. Boys of eleven or twelve were there, withshoulders broader than the average of our boys at sixteen, and yet withthe pure, childlike look on their faces. Girls of ten or eleven were therewho looked almost like women, --that is, like ideal women, --simply becausethey looked so calm and undisturbed. The Saxon coloring prevailed;three-fourths of the eyes were blue, with hair of that pale ash-brownwhich the French call "_blonde cendrée_" Out of them all there was but onechild who looked sickly. He had evidently met with some accident, and waslame. Afterward, as the congregation assembled, I watched the fathers andmothers of these children. They, too, were broad-shouldered, tall, andstraight, especially the women. Even old women were straight, like thenegroes one sees at the South, walking with burdens on their heads. 

Five days later I saw in Halifax the celebration of the anniversary of thesettlement of the province. The children of the city and of some of theneighboring towns marched in "bands of hope" and processions, such as wesee in the cities of the States on the Fourth of July. This was just theopportunity I wanted. It was the same here as in the country. I counted onthat day just eleven sickly-looking children; no more! Such brilliantcheeks, such merry eyes, such evident strength; it was a scene to kindlethe dullest soul. There were scores of little ones there, whose droll, fatlegs would have drawn a crowd in Central Park; and they all had that same, quiet, composed, well-balanced expression of countenance of which I spokebefore, and of which it would be hard to find an instance in all CentralPark. 

Climate undoubtedly has something to do with this. The air is moist, andthe mercury rarely rises above 80° or falls below 10°. Also thecomparative quiet of their lives helps to make them so beautiful andstrong. But the most significant fact to my mind is that, until the pastyear, there have been in Nova Scotia no public schools, comparatively fewprivate ones; and in these there is no severe pressure brought to bear onthe pupils. The private schools have been expensive, consequently it hasbeen very unusual for children to be sent to school before they were_eight or nine_ years of age; I could not find a person who had ever knownof a child's being sent to school _under seven!_ The school sessions areon the old plan of six hours per day, --from nine till twelve, and from onetill four; but no learning of lessons out of school has been allowed. Within the last year a system of free public schools has been introduced, "and the people are grumbling terribly about it, " said my informant. "Why?" I asked; "because they do not wish to have their childreneducated?" "Oh, no, " said he; "because they do not like to pay the taxes!""Alas!" I thought, "if it were only their silver which would be taxed!"

I must not be understood to argue from the health of the children of NovaScotia, as contrasted with the lack of health among our children, that itis best to have no public schools; only that it is better to have nopublic schools than to have such public schools as are now killing off ourchildren. 

The registration system of Nova Scotia is as yet imperfectly carried out. It is almost impossible to obtain exact returns from all parts of sothinly settled a country. But such statistics as have been alreadyestablished give sufficient food for reflection in this connection. InMassachusetts more than two-fifths of all the children born die beforethey are twelve years old. In Nova Scotia the proportion is less thanone-third. In Nova Scotia one out of every fifty-six lives to be overninety years of age; and one-twelfth of the entire number of deaths isbetween the ages of eighty and ninety. In Massachusetts one person out ofone hundred and nine lives to be over ninety. 

In Massachusetts the mortality from diseases of the brain and nervoussystem is eleven per cent. In Nova Scotia it is only eight per cent. 

The Republic of the Family. 

"He is lover and friend and son, all in one, " said a friend, the otherday, telling me of a dear boy who, out of his first earnings, had justsent to his mother a beautiful gift, costing much more than he couldreally afford for such a purpose. 

That mother is the wisest, sweetest, most triumphant mother I have everknown. I am restrained by feelings of deepest reverence for her fromspeaking, as I might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which hermotherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for nearly twenty years, andmade of her two sons "lovers and friends. " I have always felt that sheowed it to the world to impart to other mothers all that she could of herdivine secret; to write out, even in detail, all the processes by whichher boys have grown to be so strong, upright, loving, and manly. 

But one of her first principles has so direct a bearing on the subjectthat I wish to speak of here that I venture to attempt an explanation ofit. She has told me that she never once, even in their childish days, tookthe ground that she had right to require any thing from them simply_because_ she was their mother. This is a position very startling to theaverage parent. It is exactly counter to traditions. 

"Why must I?" or "Why cannot I?" says the child. "Because I say so, and Iam your father, " has been the stern, authoritative reply ever since we canany of us remember; and, I presume, ever since the Christian era, sincethat good Apostle Paul saw enough in the Ephesian families where hevisited to lead him to write to them from Rome, "Fathers, provoke not yourchildren to wrath. "

It seems to me that there are few questions of practical moment inevery-day living on which a foregone and erroneous conclusion has beenadopted so generally and so undoubtingly. How it first came about it ishard to see. Or, rather, it is easy to see, when one reflects; and thevery clearness of the surface explanation of it only makes its injusticemore odious. It came about because the parent was strong and the childweak. Helplessness in the hands of power, --that is the whole story. Suppose for an instant (and, absurd as the supposition is practically, itis not logically absurd), that the child at six were strong enough to whiphis father; let him have the intellect of an infant, the mistakes and thefaults of an infant, --which the father would feel himself bound and _wouldbe_ bound to correct, --but the body of a man; and then see in howdifferent fashion the father would set himself to work to insure goodbehavior. I never see the heavy, impatient hand of a grown man or womanlaid with its brute force, even for the smallest purpose, on a littlechild, without longing for a sudden miracle to give the baby an equalstrength to resist. 

When we realize what it is for us to dare, for our own pleasure, even withsolemnest purpose of the holiest of pleasures, parenthood, to bring intoexistence a soul, which must take for our sake its chance of joy orsorrow, how monstrous it seems to assume that the fact that we have donethis thing gives us arbitrary right to control that soul; to set our will, as will, in place of its will; to be law unto its life; to try to make ofit what it suits our fancy or our convenience to have it; to claim that itis under obligation to us!

The truth is, all the obligation, in the outset, is the other way. We oweall to them. All that we can do to give them happiness, to spare thempain; all that we can do to make them wise and good and safe, --all is toolittle! All and more than all can never repay them for the sweetness, theblessedness, the development that it has been to us to call children ours. If we can also so win their love by our loving, so deserve their respectby our honorableness, so earn their gratitude by our helpfulness, thatthey come to be our "lovers and friends, " then, ah! then we have hadenough of heaven here to make us willing to postpone the more for which wehope beyond!

But all this comes not of authority, not by command; all this is perilledalways, always impaired, and often lost, by authoritative, arbitraryruling, substitution of law and penalty for influence. 

It will be objected by parents who disagree with this theory that onlyauthority can prevent license; that without command there will not becontrol. No one has a right to condemn methods he has not tried. I know, for I have seen, I know, for I have myself tested, that command andauthority are short-lived; that they do not insure the results they aimat; that real and permanent control of a child's behavior, even in littlethings, is gained only by influence, by a slow, sure educating, enlightening, and strengthening of a child's will. I know, for I haveseen, that it is possible in this way to make a child only ten years oldquite as intelligent and trustworthy a free agent as his mother; to makehim so sensible, so gentle, so considerate that to say "must" or "mustnot" to him would be as unnecessary and absurd as to say it to her. 

But, if it be wiser and better to surround even little children with thisatmosphere of freedom, how much more essential is it for those who remainunder the parental roof long after they have ceased to be children! Justhere seems to me to be the fatal rock upon which many households makeutter shipwreck of their peace. Fathers and mothers who have ruled byauthority (let it be as loving as you please, it will still remain anarbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem to know when their childrenare children no longer, but have become men and women. In any averagefamily, the position of an unmarried daughter after she is twenty yearsold becomes less and less what it should be. In case of sons, the questionis rarely a practical one; in those exceptional instances where invalidismor some other disability keeps a man helpless for years under his father'sroof, his very helplessness is at once his vindication and his shield, andalso prevents his feeling manly revolt against the position of unnaturalchildhood. But in the case of daughters it is very different. Who does notnumber in his circle of acquaintance many unmarried women, between theages of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have practically littlemore freedom in the ordering of their own lives than they had when theywere eleven? The mother or the father continues just as much theautocratic centre of the family now as of the nursery, thirty yearsbefore. Taking into account the chance--no, the certainty--of greatdifferences between parents and children in matters of temperament andtaste, it is easy to see that great suffering must result from this;suffering, too, which involves real loss and hindrance to growth. It isreally a monstrous wrong; but it seems to be rarely observed by the world, and never suspected by those who are most responsible for it. It isperhaps a question whether the real tyrannies in this life are those thatare accredited as such. There are certainly more than even tyrants know!

Every father and mother has it within easy reach to become the intimatefriend of the child. Closest, holiest, sweetest of all friendships is thisone, which has the closest, holiest tie of blood to underlie the bond ofsoul. We see it in rare cases, proving itself divine by rising above eventhe passion of love between man and woman, and carrying men and womenunwedded to their graves for sake of love of mother or father. When werealize what such friendship is, it seems incredible that parents canforego it, or can risk losing any shade of its perfectness, for the sakeof any indulgence of the habit of command or of gratifying of selfishpreference. 

In the ideal household of father and mother and adult children, the onegreat aim of the parents ought to be to supply, as far as possible to eachchild, that freedom and independence which they have missed theopportunity of securing in homes of their own. The loss of this one thingalone is a bitterer drop in the loneliness of many an unmarried woman thanparents, especially fathers, are apt even to dream, --food and clothes andlodgings are so exalted in unthinking estimates. To be without them wouldbe distressingly inconvenient, no doubt; but one can have luxuriousprovision of both and remain very wretched. Even the body itself cannotthrive if it has no more than these three pottage messes! Freedom to come, go, speak, work, play, --in short, to be one's self, --is to the body morethan meat and gold, and to the soul the whole of life. 

Just so far as any parent interferes with this freedom of adult children, even in the little things of a single day or a single hour, just so far itis tyranny, and the children are wronged. But just so far as parentshelp, strengthen, and bestow this freedom on their children, just so farit is justice and kindness, and their relation is cemented into a supremeand unalterable friendship, whose blessedness and whose comfort no wordscan measure. 

The Ready-to-Halts. 

Mr. Ready-to-Halt must have been the most exasperating pilgrim that GreatHeart ever dragged over the road to the Celestial City. Mr. Feeble Mindwas bad enough; but genuine weakness and organic incapacity appeal all thewhile to charity and sympathy. If people really cannot walk, they must becarried. Everybody sees that; and all strong people are, or ought to be, ready to lift babies and cripples. There are plenty of such in everyparish. The Feeble Minds are unfortunately predisposed to intermarry; andour schools are overrun with the little Masters and Misses Feeble Mind. But, heavy as they are (and they are apt to be fat), they are precious andpleasant friends and neighbors in comparison with the Ready-to-Halts. 

The Ready-to-Halts are never ready for any thing else. They can walk aswell as anybody else, if they only would; but they are never quite sure onwhich road they would better go. Great Hearts have to go back, and goback, to look them up. They are found standing still, helpless andbewildered, on all sorts of absurd side-paths, which lead nowhere; andthey never will confess, either, that they need help. They always thinkthey are doing what they call "making up their mind. " But, whichever waythey make it, they wish they had made it the other; so they unmake itdirectly. And by this time the crisis of the first hour which they losthas become complicated with that of the second hour, for which they are inno wise ready; and so the hours stumble on, one after another, and the dayis only a tangle of ineffective cross purposes. Hundreds of such daysdrift on, with their sad burden of wasted time. Year after year theirlives fail of growth, of delight, of blessing to others. Opportunity'sgreat golden doors, which never stay long open for any man, have alwaysjust closed when they reach the threshold of a deed; and it is hard, veryhard, to see why it would not have been better for them if they had neverbeen born. 

After all, it is not right to be impatient with them; for, in nine casesout of ten, they are no more responsible for their mental limp than thepoor Chinese woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up to whatin our comic caricature of words we call "maturity, " they have beenbandaged. How should their muscles be good for any thing? From the daywhen we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings for him, hour byhour, without ever setting before him to choose one of two and give up theother, to the day when we take it upon ourselves to decide whether heshall be an engineer or a lawyer, we persist in doing for him the workwhich he should do for himself. This is because we love him more than welove our own lives. Oh! if love could but have its eyes opened and see!If we were not blind, we should know that whenever a child decides forhimself deliberately, and without bias from others, any question, howeversmall, he has had just so many minutes of mental gymnastics, --just so muchstrengthening of the one faculty on whose health and firmness his successin life will depend more than upon any other thing. 

So many people do not know the difference between obstinacy andclear-headed firmness of will, that it is hardly safe to say much inpraise or blame of either without expressly stating that you do not meanthe other. They are as unlike as digestion and indigestion, and one wouldsuppose could not be much more easily confounded; but it is constantlydone. It has not yet ceased to be said among fathers and mothers that itis necessary to "break the will" of children; and it has not yet ceased tobe seen in the land that men by virtue of simple obstinacy are called menof strong character. The truth is that the stronger, better-trained will aman has, the less obstinate he will be. Will is of reason; obstinacy, oftemper. What have they in common?

For want of strong will kingdoms and souls have been lost. Without itthere is no kingdom for any man, --no, not even in his own soul. It is theone attribute of all we possess which is most God-like. By it, we say, under his laws, as he says, enacting those laws, "So far and no further. "It is not enough that we do not "break" this grand power. It should bestrengthened, developed, trained. And, as the good teacher of gymnasticsgives his beginners light weights to lift and swing, so should we bring tothe children small points to decide; to the very little children, verylittle points. "Will you have the apple, or the orange? You cannot haveboth. Choose; but after you have chosen you cannot change. " "Will you havethe horseback ride to-day, or the opera to-morrow night? You can have butone. "

Every day, many times a day, a child should decide for himself pointsinvolving pros and cons, --substantial ones too. Let him even decideunwisely, and take the consequences; that too is good for him. No amountof Blackstone can give such an idea of law as a month of prison. Tell himas much as you please of what you know on both sides; but compel him todecide, and also compel him not to be too long about it. "Choose ye thisday whom ye will serve" is a text good for every morning. 

If men and women had in their childhood such training of their wills asthis, we should not see so many putting their hands to the plough andlooking back, and "not fit for the kingdom of heaven. " Nor for any kingdomof earth, either, unless it be for the wicked little kingdom of the Princeof Monaco, where there are but two things to be done, --gamble, or drownyourself. 

The Descendants of Nabal. 

The line has never been broken, and they have married into respectablefamilies, right and left, until to-day there can hardly be found ahousehold which has not at least one to worry it. 

They are not men and women of great passionate natures, who flame out nowand then in an outbreak like a volcano, from which everybody runs. This, though terrible while it lasts, is soon over, and there are greatcompensations in such souls. Their love is worth having. Their tendernessis great. One can forgive them "seventy times seven, " for the hasty wordsand actions of which they repent immediately with tears. 

But the Nabals are sullen; they are grumblers; they are never done. Suchsons of Belial are they to this day that no man can speak peaceably untothem. They are as much worse than passionate people as a slow drizzle ofrain is than a thunder-storm. For the thunder-storm, you stay in-doors, and you cannot help having pleasure in its sharp lights and darks andechoes; and when it is over, what clear air, what a rainbow! But in thedrizzle, you go out; you think that with a waterproof, an umbrella, andovershoes, you can manage to get about in spite of it, and attend to yourbusiness. What a state you come home in, --muddy, limp, chilled, disheartened! The house greets you, looking also muddy and cold, --for thebest of front halls gives up in despair and cannot look any thing butforlorn in a long, drizzling rain; all the windows are bleared withtrickling, foggy wet on the outside, which there is no wiping off norseeing through, and if one could see through there is no gain. The streetis more gloomy than the house; black, slimy mud, inches deep on crossings;the same black, slimy mud in footprints on side-walks; hopeless-lookingpeople hurrying by, so unhappy by reason of the drizzle that a weird sortof family likeness is to be seen in all their faces. This is all that canbe seen outside. It is better not to look. For the inside is no redemptionexcept a wood-fire, --a good, generous wood-fire, --not in any of the moderncompromises called open stoves, but on a broad stone hearth, with a bigbackground of chimney, up which the sparks can go skipping and creeping. 

This can redeem a drizzle; but this cannot redeem a grumbler. Plump hesits down in the warmth of its very blaze, and complains that it snaps, perhaps, or that it is oak and maple, when he paid for all hickory. Youcan trust him to put out your wood-fire for you as effectually as awater-spout. And, if even a wood-fire, bless it! cannot outshine the gloomof his presence, what is to happen in the places where there is nowood-fire, on the days when real miseries, big and little, are on hand, tobe made into mountains of torture by his grumbling? Oh, who can describehim? There is no language which can do justice to him; no supernaturalforesight which can predict where his next thrust will fall, from whatunsuspected corner he will send his next arrow. Like death, he has allseasons for his own; his ingenuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestallor appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, afterall, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is notintended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount oftotal depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till nightthere is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us;servants, landlords, drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave;clothes don't fit; teeth ache; stomachs get out of order; newspapers arestupid; and children make too much noise. If there are not big troubles, there are little ones. If they are not in sight, they are hiding. I havewondered whether the happiest mortal could point to one single moment andsay, "At that moment there was nothing in my life which I would have hadchanged. " I think not. 

In argument, therefore, the grumbler has the best of it. It is more thanprobable that things are as he says. But why say it? Why make fourmiseries out of three? If the three be already unbearable, so much theworse. If he is uncomfortable, it is a pity; we are sorry, but we cannotchange the course of Nature. We shall soon have our own little turn oftorments, and we do not want to be worn out before it comes by havinglistened to his; probably, too, the very things of which he complains arepressing just as heavily on us as on him, --are just as unpleasant toeverybody as to him. Suppose everybody did as he does. Imagine, forinstance, a chorus of grumble from ten people at a breakfast-table, allsaying at once, or immediately after each other, "This coffee is not fitto drink. " "Really, the attendance in this house is insufferably poor. " Ihave sometimes wished to try this homoeopathic treatment in a bad case ofgrumble. It sounds as if it might work a cure. 

If you lose your temper with the grumbler, and turn upon him suddenly, saying, "Oh, do not spoil all our pleasure. Do make the best of things:or, at least, keep quiet!" then how aggrieved he is! how unjust he thinksyou are to "make a personal matter of it"! "You do not, surely, suppose Ithink you are responsible for it, do you?" he says, with a lofty air ofastonishment at your unreasonable sensitiveness. Of course, we do notsuppose he thinks we are to blame; we do not take him to be a fool as wellas a grumbler. But he speaks to us, at us, before us, about the cause ofhis discomfort, whatever it may be, precisely as he would if we were toblame; and that is one thing which makes his grumbling so insufferable. But this he can never be made to see. And the worst of it is thatgrumbling is contagious. If we live with him, we shall, sooner or later, in spite of our dislike of his ways, fall into them; even sinking so low, perhaps, before the end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining ofbutter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest deep of vulgarity ofgrumbling. There is no help for this; I have seen it again and again. Ihave caught it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a thing asa diseased animal in a herd: if he be not shut up or killed, the herd islost. 

But the grumbler cannot be shut up or killed, since grumbling is not heldto be a proof of insanity, nor a capital offence, --more's the pity. 

What, then, is to be done? Keep out of his way, at all costs, if he begrown up. If it be a child, labor day and night, as you would with atendency to paralysis, or distortion of limb, to prevent this blight onits life. 

It sounds extreme to say that a child should never be allowed to express adislike of any thing which cannot be helped; but I think it is true. I donot mean that it should be positively forbidden or punished, but that itshould never pass unnoticed; his attention should be invariably called toits uselessness, and to the annoyance it gives to other people. Childrenbegin by being good-natured little grumblers at every thing which goeswrong, simply from the outspokenness of their natures. All they think theysay and act. The rudiments of good behavior have to be chiefly negative atthe outset, like Punch's advice to those about to marry, --"Don't. "

The race of grumblers would soon die out if all children were so trainedthat never, between the ages of five and twelve, did they utter a needlesscomplaint without being gently reminded that it was foolish anddisagreeable. How easy for a good-natured and watchful mother to do this!It takes but a word. 

"Oh, dear! I wish it had not rained to-day. It is too bad!"

"You do not really mean what you say, my darling. It is of much moreconsequence that the grass should grow than that you should go out toplay. And it is so silly to complain, when we cannot stop its raining. "

"Mamma, I hate this pie. "

"Oh! hush, dear! Don't say so, if you do. You can leave it. You need noteat it. But think how disagreeable it sounds to hear you say such athing. "

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I am too cold. "

"Yes, dear, I know you are. So is mamma. But we shall not feel any warmerfor saying so. We must wait till the fire burns better; and the time willseem twice as long if we grumble. "

"Oh, mamma! mamma! My steam-engine is all spoiled. It won't run. I hatethings that wind up!"

"But, my dear little boy, don't grumble so! What would you think if mammawere to say, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My little boy's stockings are full ofholes. How I hate to mend stockings!' and, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My littleboy has upset my work-box! I hate little boys'?"

How they look steadily into your eyes for a minute, --the honest, reasonable little souls!--when you say such things to them; and then runoff with a laugh, lifted up, for that time, by your fitly spoken words ofhelp. 

Oh! if the world could only stop long enough for one generation ofmothers to be made all right, what a millennium could be begun in thirtyyears!

"But, mamma, you are grumbling yourself at me because I grumbled!" says aquick-witted darling not ten years old. Ah! never shall any weak spot inour armor escape the keen eyes of these little ones. 

"Yes, dear! And I shall grumble at you till I cure you of grumbling. Grumblers are the only thing in this world that it is right to grumbleat. "

"Boys Not Allowed. "

It was a conspicuous signboard, at least four feet long, with large blackletters on a white ground: "Boys not allowed. " I looked at it for somemoments in a sort of bewildered surprise: I did not quite comprehend themeaning of the words. At last I understood it. I was waiting in a largerailway station, where many trains connect; and most of the passengersfrom the train in which I was were eating dinner in a hotel near by. I wasentirely alone in the car, with the exception of one boy, who was perhapseleven years old. I made an involuntary ejaculation as I read the words onthe sign, and the boy looked around at me. 

"Little boy, " said I, solemnly, "do you see that sign?"

He turned his head, and, reading the ominous warning, nodded sullenly, butsaid nothing. 

"Boy, what does it mean?" said I. "Boys must be allowed to come into thisrailway station. There are two now standing in the doorway directly underthe sign. "

The latent sympathy in my tone touched his heart. He left his seat, and, coming to mine, edged in past me; and, putting his head out of the window, read the sentence aloud in a contemptuous tone. Then he offered me apeanut, which I took; and he proceeded to tell me what he thought of thesign. 

"Boys not allowed!" said he. "That's just the way 'tis everywhere; but Inever saw the sign up before. It don't make any difference, though, whether they put the sign up or not. Why, in New York (you live in NewYork, don't you?) they won't even stop the horse-cars for a boy to get on. Nobody thinks any thing'll hurt a boy; but they're glad enough to 'allow'us when there's any errands to be done, and"--

"Do you live in New York?" interrupted I; for I did not wish to hear thepoor little fellow's list of miseries, which I knew by heart beforehandwithout his telling me, having been hopeless knight-errant of oppressedboyhood all my life. 

Yes, he "lived in New York, " and he "went to a grammar school, " and he had"two sisters. " And so we talked on in that sweet, ready, trustful talkwhich comes naturally only from children's lips, until the "twenty minutesfor refreshments" were over, and the choked and crammed passengers, whohad eaten big dinners in that breath of time, came hurrying back to theirseats. Among them came the father and mother of my little friend. In angrysurprise at not finding him in the seat where they left him, theyexclaimed, --

"Now, where _is_ that boy? Just like him! We might have lost every one ofthese bags. "

"Here I am, mamma, " he called out, pleasantly. "I could see the bags allthe time. Nobody came into the car. "

"I told you not to leave the seat, sir. What do you mean by such conduct?"said the father. 

"Oh, no, papa, " said poor Boy, "you only told me to take care of thebags. " And an anxious look of terror came into his face, which told onlytoo well under how severe a _régime_ he lived. I interposed hastily with--

"I am afraid I am the cause of your little son's leaving his seat. He hadsat very still till I spoke to him; and I believe I ought to take all theblame. "

The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow people. Their irritationwith him was merely a surface vexation, which had no real foundation in adeep principle. They became complaisant and smiling at my first word, andBoy escaped with a look of great relief to another seat, where they gavehim a simple luncheon of saleratus gingerbread. "Boys not allowed" to goin to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to myself; and upon that text Isat sadly meditating all the way from Springfield to Boston. 

How true it was, as the little fellow had said, that "it don't make anydifference whether they put the sign up or not!" No one can watchcarefully any average household where there are boys, and not see thatthere are a thousand little ways in which the boys' comfort, freedom, preference will be disregarded, when the girls' will be considered. Thisis partly intentional, partly unconscious. Something is to be saidundoubtedly on the advantage of making the boy realize early and keenlythat manhood is to bear and to work, and womanhood is to be helped andsheltered. But this should be inculcated, not inflicted; asked, notseized; shown and explained, not commanded. Nothing can be surer than thegrowth in a boy of tender, chivalrous regard for his sisters and for allwomen, if the seeds of it be rightly sown and gently nurtured. But thecommon method is quite other than this. It begins too harshly and at oncewith assertion or assumption. 

"Mother never thinks I am of any consequence, " said a dear boy to me, theother day. "She's all for the girls. "

This was not true; but there was truth in it. And I am very sure that theselfishness, the lack of real courtesy, which we see so plainly andpitiably in the behavior of the average young man to-day is the slow, certain result of years of just such feelings as this child expressed. Theboy has to scramble for his rights. Naturally he is too busy to think muchabout the rights of others. The man keeps up the habit, and is negativelyselfish without knowing it. 

Take, for instance, the one point of the minor courtesies (if we can dareto call any courtesies minor) of daily intercourse. How many people arethere who habitually speak to a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen with thesame civility as to his sister, a little younger or older?

"I like Miss----, " said this same dear boy to me, one day; "for shealways bids me good-morning. "

Ah! never is one such word thrown away on a loving, open-hearted boy. Menknow that safe through all the wear and tear of life they keep far greenerthe memory of some woman or some man who was kind to them in their boyhoodthan of the friend who helped or cheered them yesterday. 

Dear, blessed, noisy, rollicking, tormenting, comforting Boy! What shouldwe do without him? How much we like, without suspecting it, his breezypresence in the house! Except for him, how would errands be done, chairsbrought, nails driven, cows stoned out of our way, letters carried, twineand knives kept ready, lost things found, luncheon carried to picnics, three-year-olds that cry led out of meeting, butterflies and birds' nestsand birch-bark got, the horse taken round to the stable, borrowed thingssent home, --and all with no charge for time?

Dear, patient, busy Boy! Shall we not sometimes answer his questions? Givehim a comfortable seat? Wait and not reprove him till after the companyhas gone? Let him wear his best jacket, and buy him half as many necktiesas his sister has? Give him some honey, even if there is not enough to goround? Listen tolerantly to his little bragging, and help him "do" hissums?

With a sudden shrill scream the engine slipped off on a side-track, andthe cars glided into the great, grim city-station, looking all the grimmerfor its twinkling lights. The masses of people who were waiting and themasses of people who had come surged toward each other like two greatwaves, and mingled in a moment. I caught sight of my poor little friend, Boy, following his father, struggling along in the crowd, carrying twoheavy carpet-bags, a strapped bundle, and two umbrellas, and being sharplytold to "Keep up close there. "

"Ha!" said I, savagely, to myself, "doing porters' work is not one of thethings which 'boys' are 'not allowed. '"

Half an Hour in a Railway Station. 

It was one of those bleak and rainy days which mark the coming of springon New England sea-shores. The rain felt and looked as if it might at anyminute become hail or snow; the air pricked like needles when it blewagainst flesh. Yet the huge railway station was as full of people as ever. One could see no difference between this dreariest of days and thesunniest, so far as the crowd was concerned, except that fewer of thepeople wore fine clothes; perhaps, also, that their faces looked a littlemore sombre and weary than usual. 

There is no place in the world where human nature shows to such saddisadvantage as in waiting-rooms at railway stations, especially in the"Ladies' Room. " In the "Gentlemen's Room" there is less of that ghastly, apathetic silence which seems only explainable as an interval between twoterrible catastrophes. Shall we go so far as to confess that even theunsightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious fellowship resultingfrom their common use, seem here, for the moment, redeemed from a littleof their abominableness, --simply because almost any action is better thanutter inaction, and any thing which makes the joyless, taciturn Americanspeak to his fellow whom he does not know, is for the time being ablessing. But in the "Ladies' Room" there is not even a community ofinterest in a single bad habit, to break the monotone of weary stillness. Who has not felt the very soul writhe within her as she has first crossedthe threshold of one of these dismal antechambers of journey? Carpetless, dingy, dusty; two or three low sarcophagi of greenish-gray iron in openspaces, surrounded by blue-lipped women, in different angles and attitudesof awkwardness, trying to keep the soles of their feet in a perpendicularposition, to be warmed at what they have been led to believe is asteam-heating apparatus; a few more women, equally listless andweary-looking, standing in equally difficult and awkward positions beforea counter, holding pie in one hand, and tea in a cup and saucer in theother, taking alternate mouthfuls of each, and spilling both; the restwedged bolt upright against the wall in narrow partitioned seats, whichonly need a length of perforated foot-board in front to make them fit tobe patented as the best method of putting whole communities of citizensinto the stocks at once. All, feet warmers, pie-eaters, and those who sitin the red-velvet stocks, wear so exactly the same expression of vacuityand fatigue that they might almost be taken for one gigantic and unhappyfamily connection, on its way to what is called in newspapers "a sadevent. " The only wonder is that this stiffened, desiccated crowd retainsvitality enough to remember the hours at which its several trains depart, and to rise up and shake itself alive and go on board. One is hauntedsometimes by the fancy that some day, when the air in the room isunusually bad and the trains are delayed, a curious phenomenon will beseen. The petrifaction will be carried a little farther than usual, and, when the bell rings and the official calls out, "Train made up for Babel, Hinnom, and way stations?" no women will come forth from the "Ladies'Room, " no eye will move, no muscle will stir. Husbands and brothers willwait and search vainly for those who should have met them at the station, with bundles of the day's shopping to be carried out; homes will bedesolate; and the history of rare fossils and petrifactions will have anovel addition. Or, again, that, if some sudden convulsion of Nature, likethose which before now have buried wicked cities and the dwellers in them, were to-day to swallow up the great city of New Sodom in America, and keepit under ground for a few thousand years, nothing in all its circuit wouldso puzzle the learned archaeologists of A. D. 5873 as the position of theskeletons in these same waiting-rooms of railway stations. 

Thinking such thoughts as these, sinking slowly and surely to the level ofthe place, I waited, on this bleak, rainy day, in just such a "Ladies'Room" as I have described. I sat in the red-velvet stocks, with my eyesfixed on the floor. 

"Please, ma'am, won't you buy a basket?" said a cheery little voice. Sonear me, without my knowing it, had the little tradesman come that I wasas startled as if the voice had spoken out of the air just above my head. 

He was a sturdy little fellow, ten years old, Irish, dirty, ragged; but hehad honest, kind gray eyes, and a smile which ought to have sold morebaskets than he could carry. A few kind words unsealed the fountain of hischildish confidences. There were four children younger than he; the mothertook in washing, and the father, who was a cripple from rheumatism, madethese baskets, which he carried about to sell. 

"Where do you sell the most?"

"Round the depots. That's the best place. "

"But the baskets are rather clumsy to carry. Almost everybody has hishands full, when he sets out on a journey. "

"Yis'm; but mostly they doesn't take the baskets. But they gives me alittle change, " said he, with a smile; half roguish, half sad. 

I watched him on in his pathetic pilgrimage round that dreary room, seeking help from that dreary circle of women. 

My heart aches to write down here the true record that out of those scoresof women only three even smiled or spoke to the little fellow. Only onegave him money. My own sympathies had been so won by his face and mannerthat I found myself growing hot with resentment as I watched woman afterwoman wave him off with indifferent or impatient gesture. His face was aface which no mother ought to have been able to see without a thrill ofpity and affection. God forgive me! As if any mother ought to be able tosee any child, ragged, dirty, poor, seeking help and finding none! But hisface was so honest, and brave, and responsive that it added much to theappeal of his poverty. 

One woman, young and pretty, came into the room, bringing in her arms alarge toy horse, and a little violin. "Oh, " I said to myself, "she has aboy of her own, for whom she can buy gifts freely. She will surely givethis poor child a penny. " He thought so, too; for he went toward her witha more confident manner than he had shown to some of the others. No! Shebrushed by him impatiently, without a word, and walked to theticket-office. He stood looking at the violin and the toy horse till shecame back to her seat. Then he lifted his eyes to her face again; but sheapparently did not see him, and he went away. Ah, she is only half motherwho does not see her own child in every child!--her own child's grief inevery pain which makes another child weep!

Presently the little basket-boy went out into the great hall. I watchedhim threading his way in and out among the groups of men. I saw oneman--bless him!--pat the little fellow on the head; then I lost sight ofhim. 

After ten minutes he came back into the Ladies' Room, with only one basketin his hand, and a very happy little face. The "sterner sex" had beenkinder to him than we. The smile which he gave me in answer to my gladrecognition of his good luck was the sunniest sunbeam I have seen on ahuman face for many a day. He sank down into the red-velvet stocks, andtwirled his remaining basket, and swung his shabby little feet, as idleand unconcerned as if he were some rich man's son, waiting for the trainto take him home. So much does a little lift help the heart of a child, even of a beggar child. It is a comfort to remember him, with that look onhis face, instead of the wistful, pleading one which I saw at first. Ileft him lying back on the dusty velvet, which no doubt seemed to himunquestionable splendor. In the cars I sat just behind the woman with thetoy-horse and the violin. I saw her glance rest lovingly on them manytimes, as she thought of her boy at home; and I wondered if the littlebasket-seller had really produced no impression whatever on her heart. Ishall remember him long after (if he lives) he is a man!

A Genius For Affection. 

The other day, speaking superficially and uncharitably, I said of a woman, whom I knew but slightly, "She disappoints me utterly. How could herhusband have married her? She is commonplace and stupid. "

"Yes, " said my friend, reflectively; "it is strange. She is not abrilliant woman; she is not even an intellectual one; but there is such athing as a genius for affection, and she has it. It has been good for herhusband that he married her. "

The words sank into my heart like a great spiritual plummet They droppeddown to depths not often stirred. And from those depths came up someshining sands of truth, worth keeping among treasures; having aphosphorescent light in them, which can shine in dark places, and, makingthem light as day, reveal their beauty. 

"A genius for affection. " Yes; there is such a thing, and no other geniusis so great. The phrase means something more than a capacity, or even atalent for loving. That is common to all human beings, more or less. A manor woman without it would be a monster, such as has probably never been onthe earth. All men and women, whatever be their shortcomings in otherdirections, have this impulse, this faculty, in a degree. It takes shapein family ties: makes clumsy and unfortunate work of them in perhaps twocases out of three, --wives tormenting husbands, husbands neglecting andhumiliating wives, parents maltreating and ruining children, childrendisobeying and grieving parents, and brothers and sisters quarrelling tothe point of proverbial mention; but under all this, in spite of all this, the love is there. A great trouble or a sudden emergency will bring itout. In any common danger, hands clasp closely and quarrels are forgotten;over a sick-bed hard ways soften into yearning tenderness; and by a grave, alas! what hot tears fall! The poor, imperfect love which had let itselfbe wearied and harassed by the frictions of life, or hindered and warpedby a body full of diseased nerves, comes running, too late, with itseffort to make up lost opportunities. It has been all the while alive, butin a sort of trance; little good has come of it, but it is something thatit was there. It is the divine germ of a flower and fruit too precious tomature in the first years after grafting; in other soils, by other waters, when the healing of the nations is fulfilled, we shall see its perfection. Oh! what atonement will be there! What allowances we shall make for eachother, then! with what love we shall love!

But the souls who have what my friend meant by a "genius for affection"are in another atmosphere than that which common men breathe. Their "upperair" is clearer, more rarefied than any to which mere intellectual geniuscan soar. Because, to this last, always remain higher heights which itcannot grasp, see, nor comprehend. 

Michel Angelo may build his dome of marble, and human intellect may see asclearly as if God had said it that no other dome can ever be built sogrand, so beautiful. But above St. Peter's hangs the blue tent-dome of thesky, vaster, rounder, elastic, unfathomable, making St. Peter's look smallas a drinking-cup, shutting it soon out of sight to north, east, south, and west, by the mysterious horizon-fold which no man can lift. And beyondthis horizon-fold of our sky shut down again other domes, which the wisestastronomer may not measure, in whose distances our little ball and we, with all our spinning, can hardly show like a star. If St. Peter's wereswallowed up to-morrow, it would make no real odds to anybody but thePope. The probabilities are that Michel Angelo himself has forgotten allabout it. 

Titian and Raphael, and all the great brotherhood of painters, may kneelreverently as priests before Nature's face, and paint pictures at sight ofwhich all men's eyes shall fill with grateful tears; and yet all men shallgo away, and find that the green shade of a tree, the light on a younggirl's face, the sleep of a child, the flowering of a flower, are to theirpictures as living life to beautiful death. 

Coming to Art's two highest spheres, --music of sound and music ofspeech, --we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare, have written. But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as, it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt. Surely, theinterpretation is less than the thing interpreted. Face to face with ajoy, a sorrow, would a symphony avail us? And, as for words, who shallexpress their feebleness in midst of strength? The fettered helplessnessin spite of which they soar to such heights? The most perfect sentenceever written bears to the thing it meant to say the relation which thechemist's formula does to the thing he handles, names, analyzes, candestroy, perhaps, but cannot make. Every element in the crystal, theliquid, can be weighed, assigned, and rightly called; nothing in allscience is more wonderful than an exact chemical formula; but, after allis done, will remain for ever unknown the one subtle secret, the vitalcentre of the whole. 

But the souls who have a "genius for affection" have no outer dome, nohigher and more vital beauty; no subtle secret of creative motive force toelude their grasp, mock their endeavor, overshadow their lives. Thesubtlest essence of the thing they worship and desire, they have in theirown nature, --they are. No schools, no standards, no laws can help orhinder them. 

To them the world is as if it were not. Work and pain and loss are as ifthey were not. These are they to whom it is easy to die any death, if goodcan come that way to one they love. These are they who do die dailyunnoted on our right hand and on our left, --fathers and mothers forchildren, husbands and wives for each other. These are they, also, wholive, --which is often far harder than it is to die, --long lives, intowhose being never enters one thought of self from the rising to the goingdown of the sun. Year builds on year with unvarying steadfastness thedivine temple of their beauty and their sacrifice. They create, like God. The universe which science sees, studies, and explains, is small, ispetty, beside the one which grows under their spiritual touch; for lovebegets love. The waves of eternity itself ripple out in immortal circlesunder the ceaseless dropping of their crystal deeds. 

Angels desire to look, but cannot, into the mystery of holiness and beautywhich such human lives reveal. Only God can see them clearly. God is theirnearest of kin; for He is love. 

Rainy Days. 

With what subtle and assured tyranny they take possession of the world!Stoutest hearts are made subject, plans of conquerors set aside, --theheavens and the earth and man, --all alike at the mercy of the rain. Comewhen they may, wait long as they will, give what warnings they can, rainydays are always interruptions. No human being has planned for them thenand there. "If it had been but yesterday, " "If it were only to-morrow, " isthe cry from all lips. Ah! a lucky tyranny for us is theirs. Were theclouds subject to mortal call or prohibition, the seasons would fail anddeath get upper hand of all things before men agreed on an hour of commonconvenience. 

What tests they are of people's souls! Show me a dozen men and women inthe early morning of a rainy day, and I will tell by their words and theirfaces who among them is rich and who is poor, --who has much goods laid upfor just such times of want, and who has been spend-thrift and foolish. That curious, shrewd, underlying instinct, common to all ages, which takesshape in proverbs recognized this long ago. Who knows when it was firstsaid of a man laying up money, "He lays by for a rainy day"? How closethe parallel is between the man who, having spent on each day's living thewhole of each day's income, finds himself helpless in an emergency ofsickness whose expenses he has no money to meet, and the man who, havingno intellectual resources, no self-reliant habit of occupation, findshimself shut up in the house idle and wretched for a rainy day. I confessthat on rainy mornings in country houses, among well-dressed and so-calledintelligent and Christian people, I have been seized with strongerdisgusts and despairs about the capacity and worth of the average humancreature, than I have ever felt in the worst haunts of ignorantwickedness. 

"What is there to do to-day?" is the question they ask. I know they areabout to ask it before they speak. I have seen it in their listless anddisconcerted eyes at breakfast. It is worse to me than the tolling of abell; for saddest dead of all are they who have only a "name to live. "

The truth is, there is more to do on a rainy day than on any other. Inaddition to all the sweet, needful, possible business of living andworking, and learning and helping, which is for all days, there is thebeauty of the rainy day to see, the music of the rainy day to hear. Itdrums on the window-panes, chuckles and gurgles at corners of houses, tinkles in spouts, makes mysterious crescendoes and arpeggio chordsthrough the air; and all the while drops from the eaves and upperwindow-ledges are beating time as rhythmical and measured as that of ametronome, --time to which our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful, inspiriting or saddening, as we will. It is a curious experiment to tryrepeating or chanting lines in time and cadence following the patter ofraindrops on windows. It will sometimes be startling in its effect: nometre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid stroke of thetender drops, --there seems an uncanny _rapport_ between them at once. 

And the beauty of the rain, not even love can find words to tell it. If itleft but one trace, the exquisite shifting sheen of pearls on the outerside of the window glass, that alone one might watch for a day. In alltimes it has been thought worthy of kings, of them who are royally rich, to have garments sown thick in dainty lines and shapes with fine seedpearls. Who ever saw any such embroidery which could compare with thebeauty of one pane of glass wrought on a single side with the shiningwhite transparent globulets of rain? They are millions; they crowd; theyblend; they become a silver stream; they glide slowly down, leavingtiniest silver threads behind; they make of themselves a silver bank ofminiature sea at the bottom of the pane; and, while they do this, othermillions are set pearl-wise at the top, to crowd, blend, glide down intheir turn, and overflow the miniature sea. This is one pane, a few inchessquare; and rooms have many windows of many panes. And looking past thisspectacle, out of our windows, how is it that we do not each rainy dayweep with pleasure at sight of the glistening show? Every green thing, from tiniest grass-blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips of elms, also set thick with the water-pearls; all tossing and catching, andtossing and catching, in fairy game with the wind, and with the rainitself, always losing, always gaining, changing shape and place and numberevery moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes. 

Then at the end comes the sun, like a magician for whom all had been madeready; at sunset, perhaps, or at sunrise, if the storm has lasted allnight. In one instant the silver balls begin to disappear. By countlessthousands at a time he tosses them back whence they came; but as they go, he changes them, under our eyes, into prismatic globes, holding very lightof very light in their tiny circles, shredding and sorting it into blazinglines of rainbow color. 

All the little children shout with delight, seeing these things; and calldull, grown-up people to behold. They reply, "Yes, the storm is over;" andthis is all it means to most of them. This kingdom of heaven they cannotenter, not being "as a little child. "

It would be worth while to know, if we only could, just what ourbetters--the birds and insects and beasts--do on rainy days. But we cannotfind out much. It would be a great thing to look inside of an ant-hill ina long rain. All we know is that the doors are shut tight, and a fewsentinels, who look as if India-rubber coats would be welcome, standoutside. The stillness and look of intermission in the woods on a reallyrainy day is something worth getting wet to observe. It is like Sunday inLondon, or Fourth of July in a country town which has gone bodily to apicnic in the next village. The strays who are out seem like accidentallyarrived people, who have lost their way. One cannot fancy a caterpillar'sbeing otherwise than very uncomfortable in wet hair; and what can there befor butterflies and dragon-flies to do, in the close corners into whichthey creep, with wings shut up as tight as an umbrella? The beasts farebetter, being clothed in hides. Those whom we oftenest see out in rains(cows and oxen and horses) keep straight on with their perpetual munching, as content wet as dry, though occasionally we see them accept the partialshelter of a tree from a particularly hard shower. 

Hens are the forlornest of all created animals when it rains. Who can helplaughing at sight of a flock of them huddled up under lee of a barn, limp, draggled, spiritless, shifting from one leg to the other, with their sillyheads hanging inert to right or left, looking as if they would die forwant of a yawn? One sees just such groups of other two-legged creatures inparlors, under similar circumstances. The truth is, a hen's life at bestseems poorer than that of any other known animal. Except when she issetting, I cannot help having a contempt for her. This also has beenrecognized by that common instinct of people which goes to the making ofproverbs; for "Hen's time ain't worth much" is a common saying amongfarmers' wives. How she dawdles about all day, with her eyes not an inchfrom the ground, forever scratching and feeding in dirtiest places, --asort of animated muck-rake, with a mouth and an alimentary canal! Nowonder such an inane creature is wretched when it rains, and her soullessbusiness is interrupted. She is, I think, likest of all to the humanbeings, men or women, who do not know what to do with themselves on rainydays. 

Friends of the Prisoners. 

In many of the Paris prisons is to be seen a long, dreary room, throughthe middle of which are built two high walls of iron grating, enclosing aspace of some three feet in width. 

A stranger visiting the prison for the first time would find it hard todivine for what purpose these walls of grating had been built. But on theappointed days when the friends of the prisoners are allowed to enter theprison, their use is sadly evident. It would not be safe to permit wivesand husbands, and mothers and sons, to clasp hands in unrestrainedfreedom. A tiny file, a skein of silk, can open prison-doors and setcaptives free; love's ingenuity will circumvent tyranny and fetters, inspite of all possible precautions. Therefore the vigilant authority says, "You may see, but not touch; there shall be no possible opportunity for aninstrument of escape to be given; at more than arm's length the wife, themother must be held. " The prisoners are led in and seated on a bench uponone side of these gratings; the friends are led in and seated on a similarbench on the other side; jailers are in attendance in both rooms; no wordscan be spoken which the jailers do not hear. Yearningly eyes meet eyes;faces are pressed against the hard wires; loving words are exchanged; thepoor prisoned souls ask eagerly for news from the outer world, --the worldfrom which they are as much hidden as if they were dead. Fathers hear howthe little ones have grown; sometimes, alas! how the little ones havedied. Small gifts of fruit or clothing are brought; but must be givenfirst into the hands of the jailers. Even flowers cannot be given fromloving hand to hand; for in the tiniest flower might be hidden the secretpoison which would give to the weary prisoner surest escape of all. Allday comes and goes the sad train of friends; lingering and turning backafter there is no more to be said; weeping when they meant and tried tosmile; more hungry for closer sight and voice, and for touch, with everymoment that they gaze through the bars; and going away, at last, with anew sense of loss and separation, which time, with its merciful healing, will hardly soften before the visiting-day will come again, and the sameheart-rending experience of mingled torture and joy will again be borne. But to the prisoners these glimpses of friends' faces are like manna fromheaven. Their whole life, physical and mental, receives a new impetus fromthem. Their blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they live fromone day to the next on a memory and a hope. No punishment can be inventedso terrible as the deprivation of the sight of their friends on thevisiting-day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before any sort oramount of physical torture are subdued by mere threat of this. 

A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison Mazas, on one of thedays, said, with tears in his eyes, "It was almost more than I could bearto see these poor souls reaching out toward each other from either side ofthe iron railings. Here a poor, old woman, tottering and weak, bringing alittle fruit in a basket for her son; here a wife, holding up a baby tolook through the gratings at its father, and the father trying in an agonyof earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl, looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling withtenderness in her young face; on the side of the friends, love andyearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of theprisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shameadded, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifferenceon the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by theflashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks. "

The story so impressed me that I could not for days lose sight of thepicture it raised; the double walls of iron grating; the cruel, inexorable, empty space between them, --empty, yet crowded with words andlooks; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either side. But presentlyI said to myself, It is, after all, not so unlike the life we all live. Who of us is not in prison? Who of us is not living out his time ofpunishment? Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment of penalty forsin; disease, danger, work separate us, wall us, bury us. That we are notnumbered with the number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison, locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only an apparentdifference, and not so real a one. Our jailers do not know us; but we knowthem. There is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when our term ofsentence will expire and we shall regain freedom. It may be to-morrow; butit may be threescore years away. Meantime, we bear ourselves as if we werenot in prison. We profess that we choose, we keep our fetters out ofsight, we smile, we sing, we contrive to be glad of being alive, and wetake great interest in the changing of our jails. But no man knows wherehis neighbor's prison lies. How bravely and cheerily most eyes look up!This is one of the sweetest mercies of life, that "the heart knoweth itsown bitterness, " and, knowing it, can hide it. Hence, we can all befriends for other prisoners, standing separated from them by theimpassable iron gratings and the fixed gulf of space, which are notinappropriate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human souls. Wecan show kindly faces, speak kindly words, bear to them fruits and food, and moral help, greater than fruit or food. We need not aim atphilanthropies; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a prison-housebuilt of stone. On every road each man we meet is a prisoner; he is dyingat heart, however sound he looks; he is only waiting, however well heworks. If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, he is gone. Our onesmile would have lit up his prison-day. Alas for us if we smiled not as wepassed by! Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with our Elder Brother, we find ourselves saying, "Lord, when saw we thee sick and in prison!"

A Companion for the Winter. 

I have engaged a companion for the winter. It would be simply asuperfluous egotism to say this to the public, except that I have aphilanthropic motive for doing so. There are many lonely people who are inneed of a companion possessing just such qualities as his; and he hasbrothers singularly like himself, whose services can be secured. I despairof doing justice to him by any description. In fact, thus far, I discovernew perfections in him daily, and believe that I am yet only on thethreshold of our friendship. 

In conversation he is more suggestive than any person I have ever known. After two or three hours alone with him, I am sometimes almost startled tolook back and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and reflectionhe has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and often conveys his subtlestmeaning by a look. 

He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch the process underwhich his pictures grow with incredulous wonder. The Eastern magic whichdrops the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your eyes, blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy and clumsy by side of thecreative genius of my companion. His touch is swift as air; his coloringis vivid as light; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of hiddenplaces in all lands; and he paints, now a tufted clump of soft cocoapalms; now the spires and walls of an iceberg, glittering in yellowsunlight; now a desolate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a fewcrumbling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow; then a cathedral front, withcarvings like lace; then the skeleton of a wrecked ship, with bare ribsand broken masts, --and all so exact, so minute, so life-like, that youbelieve no man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen. 

He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous faculty for makingdrawings of curious old patterns. Nothing is too complicated for hismemory, and he revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I haveknown him in a single evening throw off a score of designs, all beautiful, and many of them rare: fiery scorpions on a black ground; pale lavenderfilagrees over scarlet; white and black squares blocked out as for tilesof a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads interlaced over them; oddChinese patterns in brilliant colors, all angles and surprises, with nolikeness to any thing in nature; and exquisite little bits of landscape insoft grays and whites. Last night was one of his nights of reminiscencesof the mosaic-workers. A furious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flakycrystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he seemed to catch theinspiration of their law of structure, and drew sheet after sheet ofcrystalline shapes; some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jarmight obliterate them; some massive and strong, like those in which theearth keeps her mineral treasures; then, at last, on a round charcoaldisk, he traced out a perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, whichpiled up under his fingers, petal after petal, circle after circle, tillthe feathery stamens were buried out of sight. Then, as we held our breathfor fear of disturbing it, with a good-natured little chuckle, he shook itoff into the fire, and by a few quick strokes of red turned the blackcharcoal disk into a shield gay enough for a tournament. 

He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely. Usually, his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows themto remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidlyunder your eye that it seems like jugglery. He is fondest of doing this attwilight, and loves the darkest corner of the room. From the half-light hewill suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which hewill give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with oneroll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snappingthat you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak ofventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile'smouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and areready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reachedthis limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like thewind through pines, sometimes almost like an Aeolian harp; then he rousesyou from your dreams by what you are sure is a tap at the door. You turn, speak, listen; no one enters; the tap again. Ah! it is only a little moreof the ventriloquism of this wonderful creature. You are alone with him, and there was no tap at the door. 

But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my companion's geniusshines out. Almost always in life the third person is a discord, or atleast a burden; but he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that, like some tints by which painters know how to bring out all the othercolors in a picture, he forces every one to do his best. I am indebted tohim already for a better knowledge of some men and women with whom I hadtalked for years before to little purpose. It is most wonderful that heproduces this effect, because he himself is so silent; but there is somesecret charm in his very smile which puts people _en rapport_ with eachother, and with him at once. 

I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things my companion cando. I have not yet told the half, nor the most wonderful; and I believe Ihave already overtaxed credulity. I will mention only one more, --but thatis to me far more inexplicable than all the rest. I am sure that itbelongs, with mesmerism and clairvoyance, to the domain of the higherpsychological mysteries. He has in rare hours the power of producing theportraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen. Forthis it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention onhim, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. Itmust also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have neverknown him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowygray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderlyand closely in attention, he throws it aside; he can do nothing. But ifyou are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, hewill presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing asmile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned from theother side, as you from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary betweenflesh and spirit. He must see them as clearly as he sees you; and it wouldbe little more for his magic to do if he were at the same moment showingto their longing eyes your face and answering smile. 

But I delay too long the telling of his name. A strange hesitancy seizesme. I shall never be believed by any one who has not sat as I have by hisside. But, if I can only give to one soul the good-cheer and strength ofsuch a presence, I shall be rewarded. 

His name is Maple Wood-fire, and his terms are from eight to twelvedollars a month, according to the amount of time he gives. This price isridiculously low, but it is all that any member of the family asks; infact, in some parts of the country, they can be hired for much less. Theyhave connections by the name of Hickory, whose terms are higher; but Icannot find out that they are any more satisfactory. There are also somedistant relations, named Chestnut and Pine, who can be employed in thesame way, at a much lower rate; but they are all snappish and uncertain intemper. 

To the whole world I commend the good brotherhood of Maple, and pass onthe emphatic indorsement of a blessed old black woman who came to my roomthe other day, and, standing before the rollicking blaze on my hearth, said, "Bless yer, honey, yer's got a wood-fire. I'se allers said that, ifyer's got a wood-fire, yer's got meat, an' drink, an' clo'es. "

Choice of Colors. 

The other day, as I was walking on one of the oldest and most picturesquestreets of the old and picturesque town of Newport, R. I. , I saw a littlegirl standing before the window of a milliner's shop. 

It was a very rainy day. The pavement of the side-walks on this street isso sunken and irregular that in wet weather, unless one walks with verygreat care, he steps continually into small wells of water. Up to herankles in one of these wells stood the little girl, apparently asunconscious as if she were high and dry before a fire. It was a very coldday too. I was hurrying along, wrapped in furs, and not quite warm enougheven so. The child was but thinly clothed. She wore an old plaid shawl anda ragged knit hood of scarlet worsted. One little red ear stood outunprotected by the hood, and drops of water trickled down over it from herhair. She seemed to be pointing with her finger at articles in the window, and talking to some one inside. I watched her for several moments, andthen crossed the street to see what it all meant. I stole noiselessly upbehind her, and she did not hear me. The window was full of artificialflowers, of the cheapest sort, but of very gay colors. Here and there aknot of ribbon or a bit of lace had been tastefully added, and the wholeeffect was really remarkably gay and pretty. Tap, tap, tap, went the smallhand against the window-pane; and with every tap the unconscious littlecreature murmured, in a half-whispering, half-singing voice, "I choose_that_ color. " "I choose _that_ color. " "I choose _that_ color. "

I stood motionless. I could not see her face; but there was in her wholeattitude and tone the heartiest content and delight. I moved a little tothe right, hoping to see her face, without her seeing me; but the slightmovement caught her ear, and in a second she had sprung aside and turnedtoward me. The spell was broken. She was no longer the queen of anair-castle, decking herself in all the rainbow hues which pleased her eye. She was a poor beggar child, out in the rain, and a little frightened atthe approach of a stranger. She did not move away, however; but stoodeying me irresolutely, with that pathetic mixture of interrogation anddefiance in her face which is so often seen in the prematurely developedfaces of poverty-stricken children. 

"Aren't the colors pretty?" I said. She brightened instantly. 

"Yes'm. I'd like a goon av thit blue. "

"But you will take cold standing in the wet, " said I. "Won't you comeunder my umbrella?"

She looked down at her wet dress suddenly, as if it had not occurred toher before that it was raining. Then she drew first one little foot andthen the other out of the muddy puddle in which she had been standing, and, moving a little closer to the window, said, "I'm not jist goin' home, mem. I'd like to stop here a bit. "

So I left her. But, after I had gone a few blocks, the impulse seized meto return by a cross street, and see if she were still there. Tears sprangto my eyes as I first caught sight of the upright little figure, standingin the same spot, still pointing with the rhythmic finger to the blues andreds and yellows, and half chanting under her breath, as before, "I choose_that_ color. " "I choose _that_ color. " "I choose _that_ color. "

I went quietly on my way, without disturbing her again. But I said in myheart, "Little Messenger, Interpreter, Teacher! I will remember you all mylife. "

Why should days ever be dark, life ever be colorless? There is always sun;there are always blue and scarlet and yellow and purple. We cannot reachthem, perhaps, but we can see them, if it is only "through a glass, " and"darkly, "--still we can see them. We can "choose" our colors. It rains, perhaps; and we are standing in the cold. Never mind. If we look earnestlyenough at the brightness which is on the other side of the glass, we shallforget the wet and not feel the cold. And now and then a passer-by, whohas rolled himself up in furs to keep out the cold, but shiversnevertheless, --who has money in his purse to buy many colors, if he likes, but, nevertheless, goes grumbling because some colors are too dear forhim, --such a passer-by, chancing to hear our voice, and see theatmosphere of our content, may learn a wondrous secret, --thatpennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; that to bewithout is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; thatsunlight is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who "choose. "

The Apostle of Beauty. 

He is not of the twelve, any more than the golden rule is of the ten. "Agreater commandment I give unto you, " was said of that. Also it was calledthe "new commandment. " Yet it was really older than the rest, and greateronly because it included them all. There were those who kept it agesbefore Moses went up Sinai: Joseph, for instance, his ancestor; and theking's daughter, by whose goodness he lived. So stands the Apostle ofBeauty, greater than the twelve, newer and older; setting Gospel overagainst law, having known law before its beginning; living triumphantlyfree and unconscious of penalty. 

He has had martyrdom, and will have. His church is never established; theworld does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of herchildren, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths whosay "Shalt not. " He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, tryingalways to usurp the throne of the true king, "Thou shalt. "

"This is delight, " "this is good to see, " he says of a purity, of a fairthing. It needs not to speak of the impurity, of the ugliness. Leftunmentioned, unforbidden, who knows how soon they might die out of men'slives, perhaps even from the earth's surface? Men hedging gardens have forcenturies set plants under that "letter of law" which "killeth, " until thevery word hedge has become a pain and an offence; and all the while therehave been standing in every wild country graceful walls of unhinderedbrier and berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been silentlypointing. By degrees gardeners have learned something. The best of themnow call themselves "landscape gardeners;" and that is a concession, if itmeans, as I suppose it does, that they will try to copy Nature'slandscapes in their enclosures. I have seen also of late that on richmen's estates tangled growths of native bushes are being more let alone, and hedges seem to have had some of the weights and harness taken off ofthem. 

This is but one little matter among millions with which the Apostle ofBeauty has to do; but it serves for instance of the first requisite hedemands, which is freedom. "Let use take care of itself. " "It will, " hesays. "There is no beauty without freedom. "

Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low or small. To speak moretruly, in his eyes there is no small, no low. From a philanthropy down toa gown, one catholic necessity, one catholic principle; gowns can bebenefactions or injuries; philanthropies can be well or ill clad. 

He has a ministry of co-workers, --men, women, and guileless littlechildren. Many of them serve him without knowing him by name. Some whoserve him best, who spread his creeds most widely, who teach them mosteloquently, die without dreaming that they have been missionaries toGentiles. Others there are who call him "Lord, Lord, " build temples to himand teach in them, who never know him. These are they who give their goodsto the poor, their bodies to be burned; but are each day ungracious, unloving, hard, cruel to men and women about them. These are they also whomake bad statues, bad pictures, invent frightful fashions of things to beworn, and make the houses and the rooms in which they live hideous withunsightly adornments. The centuries fight such, --now with a Titian, aMichel Angelo; now with a great philanthropist, who is also peaceable andeasy to be entreated; now with a Florence Nightingale, knowing no sect;now with a little child by a roadside, holding up a marigold in the sun;now with a sweet-faced old woman, dying gracefully in some almshouse. Whohas not heard voice from such apostles?

To-day my nearest, most eloquent apostle of beauty is a poor shoemaker, who lives in the house where I lodge. How poor he must be I dare not eventry to understand. He has six children: the oldest not more than thirteen, the third a deaf-mute, the baby puny and ill, --sure, I think (and hope), to die soon. 

They live in two rooms, on the ground-floor. His shop is the right-handcorner of the front room; the rest is bedroom and sitting-room; behind arethe bedroom and kitchen. I have never seen so much as I might of their wayof living; for I stand before his window with more reverent fear ofintruding by a look than I should have at the door of a king's chamber. Anarrow rough ledge added to the window-sill is his bench. Behind this hesits from six in the morning till seven at night, bent over, sewing slowlyand painfully on the coarsest shoes. His face looks old enough for sixtyyears; but he cannot be so old. Yet he wears glasses and walks feebly; hehas probably never had in any one day of his life enough to eat. But I donot know any man, and I know only one woman, who has such a look ofradiant good-cheer and content as has this poor shoemaker, Anton Grasl. 

In his window are coarse wooden boxes, in which are growing the commonmallows. They are just now in full bloom, --row upon row of gay-stripedpurple and white bells. The window looks to the east, and is never shut. When I go out to my breakfast the sun is streaming in on the flowers andAnton's face. He looks up, smiles, bows low, and says, "Good-day, good mylady, " sometimes holding the mallow-stalks back with one hand, to see memore plainly. I feel as if the day and I had had benediction. It is alwaysa better day because Anton has said it is good; and I am a better womanfor sight of his godly contentment. Almost every day he has beside themallows in the boxes a white mug with flowers in it, --nasturtiums, perhaps, or a few pinks. This he sets carefully in shade of the thickestmallows; and this I have often seen him hold down tenderly, for the littleones to see and to smell. 

When I come home in the evenings, between eight and nine o'clock, Antonis always sifting in front of the door, resting his head against the wall. This is his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and rest. Hestands with his cap in his hand while I pass, and his face shines as ifall the concentrated enjoyment of my walk in the woods had descended uponhim in my first look. If I give him a bunch of ferns to add to hisnasturtiums and pinks, he is so grateful and delighted that I have to gointo the house quickly for fear I shall cry. Whenever I am coming backfrom a drive, I begin to think, long before I reach the house, how gladAnton will look when he sees the carriage stop. I am as sure as if I hadomniscient sight into the depths of his good heart that he has distinctand unenvious joy in every pleasure that he sees other people taking. 

Never have I, heard one angry or hasty word, one petulant or weary cryfrom the rooms in which this father and mother and six children arestruggling to live. All day long the barefooted and ragged little onesplay under my south windows, and do not quarrel. I amuse myself bydropping grapes or plums on their heads, and then watching them at theirfeast; never have I seen them dispute or struggle in the division. Once Ipurposely threw a large bunch of grapes to the poor little mute, and onlya few plums to the others. I am sorry to say that voiceless Carl ate allhis grapes himself; but not a selfish or discontented look could I see onthe faces of the others, --they all smiled and beamed up at me like suns. 

It is Anton who creates and sustains this rare atmosphere. The wife isonly a common and stupid woman; he is educating her, as he is thechildren. She is very thin and worn and hungry-looking, but always smiles. Being Anton's wife, she could not do otherwise. 

Sometimes I see people passing the house, who give a careless glance ofcontemptuous pity at Anton's window of mallows and nasturtiums. Then Iremember that an apostle wrote:--

"There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none ofthem is without signification. 

"Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto himthat speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian untome. "

And I long to call after them, as they go groping their way down thebeautiful street, --

"Oh, ye barbarians, blind and deaf! How dare you think you can pity Anton?His soul would melt in compassion for you, if he were able to comprehendthat lives could be so poor as yours. He is the rich man, and you arepoor. Eating only the husks on which you feed, he would starve to death. "

English Lodging-Houses. 

Somebody who has written stories (is it Dickens?) has given us very wrongideas of the English lodging-house. What good American does not go intoLondon with the distinct impression that, whatever else he does or doesnot do, he will upon no account live in lodgings? That he will even becontent with the comfortless coffee-room of a second-rate hotel, andfraternize with commercial travellers from all quarters of the globe, rather than come into relations with that mixture of vulgarity anddishonesty, the lodging-house keeper?

It was with more than such misgiving that I first crossed the threshold ofMrs. ----'s house in Bedford Place, Bloomsbury. At this distance I smileto remember how welcome would have been any alternative rather than theremaining under her roof for a month; how persistently for several days Idoubted and resisted the evidence of all my senses, and set myself at workto find the discomforts and shortcomings which I believed must belong tothat mode of life. To confess the stupidity and obstinacy of my ignoranceis small reparation, and would be little worth while, except for the hopethat my account of the comfort and economy in living on the Englishlodging-house system may be a seed dropped in due season, which shallspring up sooner or later in the introduction of a similar system inAmerica. The gain which it would be to great numbers of our men and womenwho must live on small incomes cannot be estimated. It seems hardly toomuch to say that in the course of one generation it might work in theaverage public health a change which would be shown in statistics, and ridus of the stigma of a "national disease" of dyspepsia. For the men andwomen whose sufferings and ill-health have made of our name a by-wordamong the nations are not, as many suppose, the rich men and women, tempted by their riches to over-indulgence of their stomachs, and payingin their dyspepsia simply the fair price of their folly; they are themoderately poor men and women, who are paying cruel penalty for not havingbeen richer, --not having been rich enough to avoid the poisons which arecooked and served in American restaurants and in the poorer class ofAmerican homes. 

Mrs. ----'s lodging-house was not, so far as I know, any better than theaverage lodging-houses of its grade. It was well situated, well furnished, well kept, and its scale of prices was moderate. For instance, the rent ofa pleasant parlor and bedroom on the second floor was thirty-fourshillings a week, including fire and gas, --$8. 50, gold. Then there was acharge of two shillings a week for the use of the kitchen-fire, and threeshillings a week for service; and these were the only charges in additionto the rent. Thus for $9. 75 a week one had all the comforts that can behad in housekeeping, so far as room and service are concerned. There werefour good servants, --cook, scullery maid, and two housemaids. Oh, thepleasant voices and gentle fashions of behavior of those housemaids! Theywere slow, it must be owned; but their results were admirable. In spite ofLondon smoke and grime, Mrs. ----'s floors and windows were clean; thegrates shone every morning like mirrors, and the glass and silver werebright. Each morning the smiling cook came up to take our orders for themeals of the day; each day the grocer and the baker and the butcherstopped at the door and left the sugar for the "first floor front, " thebeef for the "drawing-room, " and so on. The smallest article which couldbe required in housekeeping was not overlooked. The groceries of thedifferent floors never got mixed, though how this separateness of storeswas accomplished will for ever remain a mystery to me; but that it wassuccessfully accomplished the smallness of our bill was the best ofproof, --unless, indeed, as we were sometimes almost afraid, we did now andthen eat up Dr. A----'s cheese, or drink the milk belonging to the B'sbelow us. We were a party of four; our fare was of the plain, substantialsort, but of sufficient variety and abundance; and yet our living nevercost us, including rent, service, fires, and food, over $60 a week. If wehad chosen to practise closer economies, we might have lived on less. Compare for one instant the comfort of such an arrangement as this, whichreally gave us every possible advantage to be secured by housekeeping, andwith almost none of the trouble, with any boarding or lodging possible inNew York. We had two parlors and two bedrooms; our meals served promptlyand neatly, in our own parlor. The same amount of room, and service, andsuch a table, for four people, cannot be had in New York for less than$150 or $200 a week; in fact, they cannot be had in New York for any sumof money. The quiet respectfulness of behavior and faithful interest inwork of English servants on English soil are not to be found elsewhere. Weafterward lived for some weeks in another lodging-house in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, at about the same price per week. This house was evenbetter than the London one in some respects. The system was precisely thesame; but the cooking was almost faultless, and the table appointmentswere more than satisfactory, --they were tasteful. The china was apleasure, and there were silver and linen and glass which one would beglad to have in one's own home. 

It may be asked, and not unnaturally, how does this lodging-house systemwork for those who keep the houses? Can it be possible that all thiscomfort and economy for lodgers are compatible with profits for landlords?I can judge only from the results in these two cases which came under myown observation. In each of these cases the family who kept the houselived comfortably and pleasantly in their own apartment, which was, in theLondon house, almost as good a suite of rooms as any which they rented. They certainly had far more apparent quiet, comfort, and privacy than iscommonly seen in the arrangements of the keepers of averageboarding-houses. In the Malvern house, one whole floor, which was lesspleasant than the others, but still comfortable and well furnished, wasoccupied by the family. There were three little boys, under ten years ofage, who had their nursery governess, said lessons to her regularly, andwere led out decorously to walk by her at appointed seasons, like all therest of good little English boys in well-regulated families; and yet themother of these children came to the door of our parlor each morning, withthe respectful air of an old family housekeeper, to ask what we would havefor dinner, and was careful and exact in buying "three penn'orth" of herbsat a time for us, to season our soup. I ought to mention that in boththese places we made the greater part of our purchases ourselves, havingweekly bills sent in from the shops, and in our names, exactly as if wewere living in our own house. All honest lodging-house keepers, we weretold, preferred this method, as leaving no opening for any unjustsuspicions of their fairness in providing. But, if one chooses to be asabsolutely free from trouble as in boarding, the marketing can all be doneby the family, and the bills still made out in the lodgers' names. I havebeen thus minute in my details because I think there may be many to whomthis system of living is as unknown as it was to me; and I cannot but hopethat it may yet be introduced in America. 

Wet the Clay. 

Once I stood in Miss Hosmer's studio, looking at a statue which she wasmodelling of the ex-queen of Naples. Face to face with the clay model, Ialways feel the artist's creative power far more than when I am looking atthe immovable marble. 

A touch here--there--and all is changed. Perhaps, under my eyes, in thetwinkling of an eye, one trait springs into life and another disappears. 

The queen, who is a very beautiful woman, was represented in Miss Hosmer'sstatue as standing, wearing the picturesque cloak that she wore duringthose hard days of garrison life at Gaeta, when she showed herself sobrave and strong that the world said if she, instead of that very stupidyoung man her husband, had been king, the throne need not have been lost. The very cloak, made of light cloth showily faced with scarlet, was drapedover a lay figure in one corner of the room. In the statue the folds ofdrapery over the right arm were entirely disarranged, simply rough clay. The day before they had been apparently finished; but that morning MissHosmer had, as she laughingly told us, "pulled it all to pieces again. "

As she said this, she took up a large syringe and showered the statuefrom head to foot with water, till it dripped and shone as if it had beenjust plunged into a bath. Now it was in condition to be moulded. Manytimes a day this process must be repeated, or the clay becomes so dry andhard that it cannot be worked. 

I had known this before; but never did I so realize the significantsymbolism of the act as when I looked at this lifeless yet lifelike thing, to be made into the beauty of a woman, called by her name, and cherishedafter her death, --and saw that only through this chrysalis of the clay, socared for, moistened, and moulded, could the marble obtain its soul. 

And, as all things I see in life seem to me to have a voice either for orof children, so did this instantly suggest to me that most of the failuresof mothers come from their not keeping the clay wet. 

The slightest touch tells on the clay when it is soft and moist, and canproduce just the effect which is desired; but when the clay is too dry itwill not yield, and often it breaks and crumbles beneath the unskilfulhand. How perfect the analogy between these two results, and the twoatmospheres which one often sees in the space of one half-hour in themanagement of the same child! One person can win from it instantly agentle obedience: that person's smile is a reward, that person'sdispleasure is a grief it cannot bear, that person's opinions have utmostweight with it, that person's presence is a controlling and subduinginfluence. Another, alas! the mother, produces such an opposite effectthat it is hard to believe the child can be the same child. Her simplestcommand is met by antagonism or sullen compliance; her pleasure anddispleasure are plainly of no account to the child, and its great desireis to get out of her presence. 

What shape will she make of that child's soul? She does not wet the clay. She does not stop to consider before each command whether it be whollyjust, whether it be the best time to make it, and whether she can explainits necessity. Oh! the sweet reasonableness of children when disagreeablenecessities are explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbitrarytyrannies! She does not make them so feel that she shares all theirsorrows and pleasures that they cannot help being in turn glad when she isglad, and sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them into constantcompanionship in her interests, each day, --the books, the papers shereads, the things she sees, --that they learn to hold her as therepresentative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and breadand butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them, warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways. "Ican't imagine why children are so much better with you than with me, "exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble. If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a farmore anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor, whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient;while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen. 

She is all the time working, working, with endless activity, on hard, dryclay; and the neighbor, who, perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the claywet, is with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of Nature's ownloveliest shapes. 

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged because her childrentell lies, and irritated because they seem to her thankless, "After all, children are pretty much alike, I suppose. I believe most children telllies when they are little; and they never realize until they are grown upwhat parents do for them. "

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who paint or model. Studios are full of such caricatures, and the hard-working, honest soulswho have made them believe that they are true reproductions of nature andlife. 

"See my cherub. Are not all cherubs such as he?" and "Behold these treesand this water; and how the sun glowed on the day when I walked there!"and all the while the cherub is like a paper doll, and the trees and thewater never had any likeness to any thing that is in this beautiful earth. But, after all, this similitude is short and paltry, for it is ofcomparatively small moment that so many men and women spend their lives inmaking bad cherubs in marble, and hideous landscapes in oil. It isindustry, and it keeps them in bread; in butter, too, if their cherubs andtrees are very bad. But, when it is a human being that is to be moulded, how do we dare, even with all the help which we can ask and find in earthand in heaven, to shape it by our touch!

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more plastic than is the littlechild's soul in the hands of those who tend it. Alas! how many shapeless, how many ill-formed, how many broken do we see! Who does not believe thatthe image of God could have been beautiful on all? Sooner or later it willbe, thank Christ! But what a pity, what a loss, not to have had the sweetblessedness of being even here fellow-workers with him in this gloriousmodelling for eternity!

The King's Friend. 

We are a gay party, summering among the hills. New-comers into the littleboarding-house where we, by reason of prior possession, hold a kind ofsway are apt to fare hardly at our hands unless they come up to ourstandard. We are not exacting in the matter of clothes; we are liberal oncreeds; but we have our shibboleths. And, though we do not drown unluckyEphraimites, whose tongues make bad work with S's, I fear we are not quitekind to them; they never stay long, and so we go on having it much our ownway. 

Week before last a man appeared at dinner, of whom our good littlelandlady said, deprecatingly, that he would stay only a few days. She knewby instinct that his presence would not be agreeable to us. He was not inthe least an intrusive person, --on the contrary, there was a sort of muteappeal to our humanity in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness;but his whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting. He was untrained inmanner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table routine; and, altogether, itwas so uncomfortable to make any attempt to include him in our circle thatin a few days he was ignored by every one, to a degree which was neithercourteous nor Christian. 

In all families there is a leader. Ours is a charming and brilliantmarried woman, whose ready wit and never-failing spirits make her the bestof centres for a country party of pleasure-seekers. Her keen sense ofhumor had not been able entirely to spare this unfortunate man, whoseattitudes and movements were certainly at times almost irresistible. 

But one morning such a change was apparent in her manner toward him thatwe all looked up in surprise. No more gracious and gentle greeting couldshe have given him if he had been a prince of royal line. Our astonishmentalmost passed bounds when we heard her continue with a kindly inquiryafter his health, and, undeterred by his evident readiness to launch intodetailed symptoms, listen to him with the most respectful attention. Underthe influence of this new and sweet recognition his plain and common facekindled into something almost manly and individual. He had never beforebeen so spoken to by a well-bred and beautiful woman. 

We were sobered, in spite of ourselves, by an indefinable something in hermanner; and it was with subdued whispers that we crowded around her on thepiazza, and begged to know what it all meant. It was a rare thing to seeMrs. ---- hesitate for a reply. The color rose in her face, and, with ahalf-nervous attempt at a smile, she finally said, "Well, girls, I supposeyou will all laugh at me; but the truth is, I heard that man say hisprayers this morning. You know his room is next to mine, and there is agreat crack in the door. I heard him praying, this morning, for tenminutes, just before breakfast; and I never heard such tones in my life. Idon't pretend to be religious; but I must own it was a wonderful thing tohear a man talking with God as he did. And when I saw him at table, I feltas if I were looking in the face of some one who had just come out of thepresence of the King of kings, and had the very air of heaven about him. Ican't help what the rest of you do or say; _I_ shall always have the samefeeling whenever I see him. "

There was a magnetic earnestness in her tone and look, which we all felt, and which some of us will never forget. 

During the few remaining days of his stay with us, that untutored, uninteresting, stupid man knew no lack of friendly courtesy at our hands. We were the better for his homely presence; unawares, he ministered untous. When we knew that he came directly from speaking to the Master tospeak to us, we felt that he was greater than we, and we remembered thatit is written, "If any man serve me, him will my Father honor. "

Learning to Speak. 

With what breathless interest we listen for the baby's first word! What anew bond is at once and for ever established between its soul and ours bythis mysterious, inexplicable, almost incredible fact! That is the use ofthe word. That is its only use, so far as mere gratification of the eargoes. Many other sounds are more pleasurable, --the baby's laugh, forinstance, or its inarticulate murmurs of content or sleepiness. 

But the word is a revelation, a sacred sign. Now we shall know what ourbeloved one wants; now we shall know when and why the dear heart sorrowsor is glad. How reassured we feel, how confident! Now we cannot makemistakes; we shall do all for the best; we can give happiness; we cancommunicate wisdom; relation is established; the perplexing gulf ofsilence is bridged. The baby speaks!

But it is not of the baby's learning to speak that we propose to writehere. All babies learn to speak; or, if they do not, we know that it meansa terrible visitation, --a calamity rare, thank God! but bitter almostbeyond parents' strength to bear. 

But why, having once learned to speak, does the baby leave off speakingwhen it becomes a man or a woman? Many of our men and women to-day need, almost as much as when they were twenty-four months old, to learn tospeak. We do not mean learning to speak in public. We do not mean evenlearning to speak well, --to pronounce words clearly and accurately; thoughthere is need enough of that in this land! But that is not the need atwhich we are aiming now. We mean something so much simpler, so muchfurther back, that we hardly know how to say it in words which shall besimple enough and also sufficiently strong. We mean learning to speak atall! In spite of all which satirical writers have said and say of theloquacious egotism, the questioning curiosity of our people, it is trueto-day that the average American is a reticent, taciturn, speechlesscreature, who, for his own sake, and still more for the sake of all wholove him, needs, more than he needs any thing else under heaven, to learnto speak. 

Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat-cabins, hotel-tables, in short, all our public places where people are thrown togetherincidentally, and where good-will and the habit of speaking combined wouldcreate an atmosphere of human vitality, quite unlike what we see now. Butit is not of so much consequence, after all, whether people speak in thesepublic places or not. If they did, one very unpleasant phase of ournational life would be greatly changed for the better. But it is in ourhomes that this speechlessness tells most fearfully, --on the breakfast anddinner and tea-tables, at which a silent father and mother sit down inhaste and gloom to feed their depressed children. This is especially trueof men and women in the rural districts. They are tired; they have morework to do in a year than it is easy to do. Their lives aremonotonous, --too much so for the best health of either mind or body. Ifthey dreamed how much this monotony could be broken and cheered by theconstant habit of talking with each other, they would grasp at theslightest chance of a conversation. Sometimes it almost seems as ifcomplaints and antagonism were better than such stagnant quiet. But thereneed not be complaint and antagonism; there is no home so poor, so remotefrom affairs, that each day does not bring and set ready, for familywelcome and discussion, beautiful sights and sounds, occasions forhelpfulness and gratitude, questions for decision, hopes, fears, regrets!The elements of human life are the same for ever; any one heart holds initself the whole, can give all things to another, can bear all things foranother; but no giving, no bearing, no, not even if it is the giving up ofa life, if it is done without free, full, loving interchange of speech, ishalf the blessing it might be. 

Many a wife goes down to her grave a dulled and dispirited woman simplybecause her good and faithful husband has lived by her side withouttalking to her! There have been days when one word of praise, or one wordeven of simple good cheer, would have girded her up with new strength. Shedid not know, very likely, what she needed, or that she needed any thing;but she drooped. 

Many a child grows up a hard, unimpressionable, unloving man or womansimply from the uncheered silence in which the first ten years of lifewere passed. Very few fathers and mothers, even those who are fluent, perhaps, in society, habitually _talk_ with their children. 

It is certain that this is one of the worst shortcomings of our homes. Perhaps no other single change would do so much to make them happier, and, therefore, to make our communities better, as for men and women to learnto speak. 

Private Tyrants. 

We recognize tyranny when it wears a crown and sits on an hereditarythrone. We sympathize with nations that overthrow the thrones, and in oursecret hearts we almost canonize individuals who slay the tyrants. Fromthe days of Ehud and Eglon down to those of Charlotte Corday and Marat, the world has dealt tenderly with their names whose hands have been redwith the blood of oppressors. On moral grounds it would be hard to justifythis sentiment, murder being murder all the same, however great gain itmay be to this world to have the murdered man put out of it; but thatthere is such a sentiment, instinctive and strong in the human soul, thereis no denying. It is so instinctive and so strong that, if we watchourselves closely, we shall find it giving alarming shape sometimes to oursecret thoughts about our neighbors. 

How many communities, how many households even, are without a tyrant? Ifwe could "move for returns of suffering, " as that tender and thoughtfulman, Arthur Helps, says, we should find a far heavier aggregate of miseryinflicted by unsuspected, unresisted tyrannies than by those which arepatent to everybody, and sure to be overthrown sooner or later. 

An exhaustive sermon on this subject should be set off in three divisions, as follows:--

 PRIVATE TYRANTS. 

 _1st. _ Number of-- _2d. _ Nature of-- _3d. _ Longevity of--

_First_. Their number. They are not enumerated in any census. Not even themost painstaking statistician has meddled with the topic. Fancy takes boldleaps at the very suggestion of such an estimate, and begins to think atonce of all things in the universe which are usually mentioned as beyondnumbering. Probably one good way of getting at a certain sort of resultwould be to ask each person of one's acquaintance, "Do you happen to knowa private tyrant?"

How well we know beforehand the replies we should get from _some_ belovedmen and women, --that is, if they spoke the truth!

But they would not. That is the saddest thing about these privatetyrannies. They are in many cases borne in such divine and uncomplainingsilence by their victims, perhaps for long years, the world never dreamsthat they exist. But at last the fine, subtle writing, which no control, no patience, no will can thwart, becomes set on the man's or the woman'sface, and tells the whole record. Who does not know such faces? Cheerfulusually, even gay, brave, and ready with lines of smile; but in repose somarked, so scarred with unutterable weariness and disappointment, thattears spring in the eyes and love in the hearts of all finely organizedpersons who meet them. 

_Secondly_. Nature of private tyrants. Here also the statistician has notentered. The field is vast; the analysis difficult. 

Selfishness is, of course, their leading characteristic; in fact, the verysum and substance of their natures. But selfishness is Protean. It has asmany shapes as there are minutes, and as many excuses and wraps of sheep'sclothing as ever ravening wolf possessed. 

One of its commonest pleas is that of weakness. Here it often is soinextricably mixed with genuine need and legitimate claim that one growsbewildered between sympathy and resentment. In this shape, however, itgets its cruelest dominion over strong and generous and tender people. This kind of tyranny builds up and fortifies its bulwarks on and out ofthe very virtues of its victims; it gains strength hourly from the verystrength of the strength to which it appeals; each slow and fatalencroachment never seems at first so much a thing required as a thingoffered; but, like the slow sinking inch by inch of that great, beautifulcity of stone into the relentless Adriatic, so is the slow, sure goingdown and loss of the freedom of a strong, beautiful soul, helpless in theomnipresent circumference of the selfish nature to which it is or believesitself bound. 

That the exactions never or rarely take shape in words is, to theunbiassed looker-on, only an exasperating feature in their tyranny. Whileit saves the conscience of the tyrant, --if such tyrants have any, --itmakes doubly sure the success of their tyranny. And probably nothing shortof revelation from Heaven, in shape of blinding light, would ever opentheir eyes to the fact that it is even more selfish to hold a generousspirit fettered hour by hour by a constant fear of giving pain than tocoerce or threaten or scold them into the desired behavior. Invalids, allinvalids, stand in deadly peril of becoming tyrants of this order. Achronic invalid who entirely escapes it must be so nearly saint or angelthat one instinctively feels as if their invalidism would soon end in thehealth of heaven. We know of one invalid woman, chained to her bed forlong years by an incurable disease, who has had the insight and strengthto rise triumphant above this danger. Her constant wish and entreaty isthat her husband should go freely into all the work and the pleasure oflife. Whenever he leaves her, her farewell is not, "How soon do you thinkyou shall come back? At what hour, or day, may I look for you?" but, "Now, pray stay just as long as you enjoy it. If you hurry home one hour soonerfor the thought of me, I shall be wretched. " It really seems almost as ifthe longer he stayed away, --hours, days, weeks even, --the happier shewere. By this sweet and wise unselfishness she has succeeded in realizingthe whole blessedness of wifehood far more than most women who havehealth. But we doubt if any century sees more than one such woman as sheis. 

Another large class, next to that of invalids the most difficult to dealwith, is made up of people who are by nature or by habit uncomfortablysensitive or irritable. Who has not lived at one time or other in his lifein daily contact with people of this sort, --persons whose outbreaks oftemper, or of wounded feeling still worse than temper, were asincalculable as meteoric showers? The suppressed atmosphere, the chronicstate of alarm and misgiving, in which the victims of this species oftyranny live are withering and exhausting to the stoutest hearts. They arealso hardening; perpetually having to wonder and watch how people will"take" things is apt sooner or later to result in indifference as towhether they take them well or ill. 

But to define all the shapes of private tyranny would require wholehistories; it is safe, however, to say that so far as any human beingattempts to set up his own individual need or preference as law todetermine the action of any other human being, in small matters or great, so far forth he is a tyrant. The limit of his tyranny may be narrowed bylack of power on his part, or of response on the part of his fellows; butits essence is as purely tyrannous as if he sat on a throne with anexecutioner within call. 

_Thirdly. _ Longevity of private tyrants. We have not room under this headto do more--nor, if we had all room, could we do better--than to quote ashort paragraph from George Eliot's immortal Mrs. Poyser: "It seems as ifthem as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted i' th'other world. "

Margin. 

Wide-margined pages please us at first sight. We do not stop to ask why. It has passed into an accepted rule that all elegant books must havebroad, clear margins to their pages. We as much recognize such marginsamong the indications of promise in a book, as we do fineness of paper, clearness of type, and beauty of binding. All three of these last, even inperfection, could not make any book beautiful, or sightly, whose pages hadbeen left narrow-margined and crowded. This is no arbitrary decree ofcustom, no chance preference of an accredited authority. It would bedangerous to set limit to the power of fashion in any thing; and yet itseems almost safe to say that not even fashion itself can ever make anarrow-margined page look other than shabby and mean. This inalienableright of the broad margin to our esteem is significant. It lies deep. Thebroad margin means something which is not measured by inches, has nothingto do with fashions of shape. It means room for notes, queries, added byany man's hand who reads. Meaning this, it means also much more thanthis, --far more than the mere letter of "right of way. " It is a finecourtesy of recognition that no one page shall ever say the whole of itsown message; be exhaustive, or ultimate, even of its own topic; determineor enforce its own opinion, to the shutting out of others. No matter ifthe book live and grow old, without so much as an interrogation point or aline of enthusiastic admiration drawn in it by human hand, still thegracious import and suggestion of its broad white spaces are the same. Each thought invites its neighbor, stands fairly to right or left of itsopponent, and wooes its friend. 

Thinking on this, we presently discover that margin means a species offreedom. No wonder the word, and the thing it represents, wherever we findthem, delight us. 

We use the word constantly in senses which, speaking carelessly, we shouldhave called secondary and borrowed. Now we see that its application topages, or pictures, or decorations, and so forth, was the borrowed andsecondary use; and that primarily its meaning is spiritual. 

We must have margin, or be uncomfortable in every thing in life. Our planfor a day, for a week, for our lifetime, must have it, --margin for changeof purpose, margin for interruption, margin for accident. Making noallowance for these, we are fettered, we are disturbed, we are thwarted. 

Is there a greater misery than to be hurried? If we leave ourselves propermargin, we never need to be hurried. We always shall be, if we crowd ourplan. People pant, groan, and complain as if hurry were a thing outsideof themselves, --an enemy, a monster, a disease which overtook them, andagainst which they had no shelter. It is hard to be patient with suchnonsense. Hurry is almost the only known misery which it is impossible tohave brought upon one by other people's fault. 

If our plan of action for an hour or a day be so fatally spoiled by lackof margin, what shall we say of the mistake of the man who leaves himselfno margin in matters of belief? No room for a wholesome, healthy doubt? Noprovision for an added enlightenment? No calculation for the inevitableprogress of human knowledge? This is, in our eyes, the crying sin anddanger of elaborate creeds, rigid formulas of exact statement on difficultand hidden mysteries. 

The man who is ready to give pledge that the opinion he will holdto-morrow will be precisely the opinion he holds to-day has either thoughtvery little, or to little purpose, or has resolved to quit thinkingaltogether. 

The Fine Art of Smiling. 

Some theatrical experiments are being made at this time to show that allpossible emotions and all shades and gradations of emotion can beexpressed by facial action, and that the method of so expressing them canbe reduced to a system, and taught in a given number of lessons. It seemsa matter of question whether one would be likely to make love or evincesorrow any more successfully by keeping in mind all the while the detailedcatalogue of his flexors and extensors, and contracting and relaxing No. 1, 2, or 3, according to rule. The human memory is a treacherous thing, and what an enormous disaster would result from a very slightforgetfulness in such a nicely adjusted system! The fatal effect ofdropping the superior maxillary when one intended to drop the inferior, orof applying nervous stimuli to the up track, instead of the down, caneasily be conceived. Art is art, after all, be it ever so skilful andtriumphant, and science is only a slow reading of hieroglyphs. Nature sitshigh and serene above both, and smiles compassionately on their effortsto imitate and understand. And this brings us to what we have to say aboutsmiling. Do many people feel what a wonderful thing it is that each humanbeing is born into the world with his own smile? Eyes, nose, mouth, may bemerely average commonplace features; may look, taken singly, very muchlike anybody's else eyes, nose, or mouth. Let whoever doubts this try thesimple but endlessly amusing experiment of setting half a dozen peoplebehind a perforated curtain, and making them put their eyes at the holes. Not one eye in a hundred can be recognized, even by most familiar andloving friends. But study smiles; observe, even in the most casual way, the variety one sees in a day, and it will soon be felt what subtlerevelation they make, what infinite individuality they possess. 

The purely natural smile, however, is seldom seen in adults; and it is onthis point that we wish to dwell. Very early in life people find out thata smile is a weapon, mighty to avail in all sorts of crises. Hence, we seethe treacherous smile of the wily; the patronizing smile of the pompous;the obsequious smile of the flatterer; the cynical smile of the satirist. Very few of these have heard of Delsarte; but they outdo him on his owngrounds. Their smile is four-fifths of their social stock in trade. Allsuch smiles are hideous. The gloomiest, blankest look which a human facecan wear is welcomer than a trained smile or a smile which, if it is notactually and consciously methodized by its perpetrator, has become, bylong repetition, so associated with tricks and falsities that it partakesof their quality. 

What, then, is the fine art of smiling?

If smiles may not be used for weapons or masks, of what use are they? Thatis the shape one would think the question took in most men's minds, if wemay judge by their behavior! There are but two legitimate purposes of thesmile; but two honest smiles. On all little children's faces such smilesare seen. Woe to us that we so soon waste and lose them!

The first use of the smile is to express affectionate good-will; thesecond, to express mirth. 

Why do we not always smile whenever we meet the eye of a fellow-being?That is the true, intended recognition which ought to pass from soul tosoul constantly. Little children, in simple communities, do thisinvoluntarily, unconsciously. The honest-hearted German peasant does it. It is like magical sunlight all through that simple land, the perpetualgreeting on the right hand and on the left, between strangers, as theypass by each other, never without a smile. This, then, is "the fine art ofsmiling;" like all fine art, true art, perfection of art, the simplestfollowing of Nature. 

Now and then one sees a face which has kept its smile pure and undefiled. It is a woman's face usually; often a face which has trace of great sorrowall over it, till the smile breaks. Such a smile transfigures; such asmile, if the artful but knew it, is the greatest weapon a face can have. Sickness and age cannot turn its edge; hostility and distrust cannotwithstand its spell; little children know it, and smile back; even dumbanimals come closer, and look up for another. 

If one were asked to sum up in one single rule what would most conduce tobeauty in the human face, one might say therefore, "Never tamper with yoursmile; never once use it for a purpose. Let it be on your face like thereflection of the sunlight on a lake. Affectionate good-will to all menmust be the sunlight, and your face is the lake. But, unlike the sunlight, your good-will must be perpetual, and your face must never be overcast. "

"What! smile perpetually?" says the realist. "How silly!"

Yes, smile perpetually! Go to Delsarte here, and learn even from themechanician of smiles that a smile can be indicated by a movement ofmuscles so slight that neither instruments nor terms exist to measure orstate it; in fact, that the subtlest smile is little more than an addedbrightness to the eye and a tremulousness of the mouth. One second of timeis more than long enough for it; but eternity does not outlast it. 

In that wonderfully wise and tender and poetic book, the "Layman'sBreviary, " Leopold Schefer says, --

 "A smile suffices to smile death away; And love defends thee e'en from wrath divine! Then let what may befall thee, --still smile on! And howe'er Death may rob thee, --still smile on! Love never has to meet a bitter thing; A paradise blooms around him who smiles. "

Death-Bed Repentance. 

Not long since, a Congregationalist clergyman, who had been for forty-oneyears in the ministry, said in my hearing, "I have never, in all myexperience as a pastor, known of a single instance in which a repentanceon what was supposed to be a death-bed proved to be of any value whateverafter the person recovered. "

This was strong language. I involuntarily exclaimed, "Have you known manysuch cases?"

"More than I dare to remember. "

"And as many more, perhaps, where the person died. "

"Yes, fully as many more. "

"Then did not the bitter failure of these death-bed repentances to bearthe tests of time shake your confidence in their value under the tests ofeternity?"

"It did, --it does, " said the clergyman, with tears in his eyes. Theconversation made a deep impression on my mind. It was strong evidence, from a quarter in which I least looked for it, of the utter paltriness andinsufficiency of fear as a motive when brought to bear upon decisions inspiritual things. There seem to be no words strong enough to stigmatize itin all other affairs except spiritual. All ages, all races, hold cowardicechief among vices; noble barbarians punished it with death. Evencivilization the most cautiously legislated for, does the same thing whena soldier shows it "in face of the enemy. " Language, gathering itself upand concentrating its force to describe base behavior, can do no more thancall it "cowardly. " No instinct of all the blessed body-guard of instinctsborn with us seems in the outset a stronger one than the instinct that tobe noble, one must be brave. Almost in the cradle the baby taunts or istaunted by the accusation of being "afraid. " And the sting of the tauntlies in the probability of its truth. For in all men, alas! is born acertain selfish weakness, to which fear can address itself. But howstrange does it appear that they who wish to inculcate noblest action, raise to most exalted spiritual conditions, should appeal to this lowestof motives to help them! We believe that there are many "death-bedrepentances" among hale, hearty sinners, who are approached by the samemethods, stimulated by the same considerations, frightened by the sameconceptions of possible future suffering, which so often make the chambersof dying men dark with terrors. Fear is fear all the same whether itsdread be for the next hour or the next century. The closer the enemy, theswifter it runs. That is all the difference. Let the enemy be surely andplainly removed, and in one instance it is no more, --is as if it hadnever been. Every thought, word, and action based upon it has come to end. 

I was forcibly reminded of the conversation above quoted by someobservations I once had opportunity of making at a Methodist camp-meeting. Much of the preaching and exhortation consisted simply and solely ofurgent, impassioned appeals to the people to repent, --not becauserepentance is right; not because God is love, and it is base not to loveand obey him; not even because godliness is in itself great gain, andsinfulness is, even temporarily, loss and ruin; but because there is awrath to come, which will inflict terrible and unending suffering on thesinner. He is to "flee" for his life from torments indescribable andeternal; he is to call on Jesus, not to make him holy, but to save himfrom woe, to rescue him from frightful danger; all and every thing else issubordinate to the one selfish idea of escaping future misery. The effectof these appeals, of these harrowing pictures, on some of the young menand women and children was almost too painful to be borne. They were in anhysterical condition, --weeping from sheer nervous terror. When theexcitement had reached its highest pitch, an elder rose and told the storyof a wicked and impenitent man whom he had visited a few weeks before. Theman had assented to all that he told him of the necessity of repentance;but said that he was not at leisure that day to attend the class meeting. He resolved and promised, however, to do so the next week. That verynight he was taken ill with a disease of the brain, and, after three daysof unconsciousness, died. I would not like to quote here the emphasis ofapplication which was made of this story to the terrors of the weepingyoung people. Under its influence several were led, almost carried byforce, into the anxious seats. 

It was hard not to fancy the gentle Christ looking down upon the scenewith a pain as great as that with which he yearned over Jerusalem. Ilonged for some instant miracle to be wrought on the spot, by which thereshould come floating down from the peaceful blue sky, through the sweettree-tops, some of the loving and serene words of balm from his Gospel. 

Theologians may theorize, and good Christians may differ (they alwayswill) as to the existence, extent, and nature of future punishment; butthe fact remains indisputably clear that, whether there be less or more ofit, whether it be of this sort or of that, fear of it is a base motive toappeal to, a false motive to act from, and a worthless motive to trust in. Perfect love does not know it; spiritual courage resents it; the trueKingdom of Heaven is never taken by its "violence. "

Somewhere (I wish I knew where, and I wish I knew from whose lips) I oncefound this immortal sentence: "A woman went through the streets ofAlexandria, bearing a jar of water and a lighted torch, and crying aloud, 'With this torch I will burn up Heaven, and with this water I will put outHell, that God may be loved for himself alone. '"

The Correlation of Moral Forces. 

Science has dealt and delved patiently with the laws of matter. FromCuvier to Huxley, we have a long line of clear-eyed workers. Thegravitating force between all molecules; the law of continuity; theinertial force of matter; the sublime facts of organic co-ordination andadaptation, --all these are recognized, analyzed, recorded, taught. We havelearned that the true meaning of the word law, as applied to Nature, isnot decree, but formula of invariable order, immutable as the constitutionof ultimate units of matter. Order is not imposed upon Nature. Order isresult. Physical science does not confuse these; it never mistakes nordenies specific function, organic progression, cyclical growth. It knowsthat there is no such thing as evasion, interruption, substitution. 

When shall we have a Cuvier, a Huxley, a Tyndall for the immaterialworld, --the realm of spiritual existence, moral growth? Nature is one. Thethings which we have clumsily and impertinently dared to set off bythemselves, and label as "immaterial, " are no less truly component partsor members of the real frame of natural existence than are molecules ofoxygen or crystals of diamond. We believe in the existence of one as muchas in the existence of the other. In fact, if there be balance of proof infavor of either, it is not in favor of the existence of what we callmatter. All the known sensible qualities of matter are ultimatelyreferable to immaterial forces, --"forces acting from points or volumes;"and whether these points are occupied by positive substance, or "matter"as it is usually conceived, cannot to-day be proved. Yet many men haveless absolute belief in a soul than in nitric acid; many men achievelifetimes of triumph by the faithful use and application of Nature'slaw--that is, formula of uniform occurrence--in light, sound, motion, while they all the while outrage and violate and hinder every one of thosesweet forces equally hers, equally immutable, called by such names astruth, sobriety, chastity, courage, and good-will. 

The suggestions of this train of thought are too numerous to be followedout in the limits of a single article. Take, for instance, the fact of theidentity of molecules, and look for its correlative truth in the spiritualuniverse. Shall we not thence learn charity, and the better understand thefull meaning of some who have said that vices were virtues in excess orrestraint? Taking the lists of each, and faithfully comparing them frombeginning to end, not one shall be found which will not confirm thisseemingly paradoxical statement. 

Take the great fact of continuous progressive development which appliesto all organisms, vegetable or animal, and see how it is one with the lawthat "the holy shall be holy still, the wicked shall be wicked still. "

Dare we think what would be the formula in statement of spiritual lifewhich would be correlative to the "law of continuity"? Having dared tothink, then shall we use the expression "little sins, " or doubt theterrible absoluteness of exactitude with which "every idle word which menspeak" shall enter upon eternity of reckoning. 

On the other hand, looking at all existences as organisms, shall we bedisturbed at seeming failure?--long periods of apparent inactivity? Shallwe believe, for instance, that Christ's great church can be reallyhindered in its appropriate cycle of progressive change and adaptation?That any true membership of this organic body can be formed or annulled bymere human interference? That the lopping or burning of branches of thetree, even the uprooting and burning of the tree itself, this year, nextyear, nay, for hundreds of years, shall have power to annihilate or evendefer the ultimate organic result?

The soul of man is not outcast from this glory, this freedom, this safetyof law. We speak as if we might break it, evade it; we forget it; we denyit: but it never forgets us, it never refuses us a morsel of our estate. In spite of us, it protects our growth, makes sure of our development. Inspite of us, it takes us whithersoever we tend, and not whithersoever welike; in spite of us, it sometimes saves what we have carelessly perilled, and always destroys what we wilfully throw away. 

A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner. 

All good recipe-books give bills of fare for different occasions, bills offare for grand dinners, bills of fare for little dinners; dinners to costso much per head; dinners "which can be easily prepared with one servant, "and so on. They give bills of fare for one week; bills of fare for eachday in a month, to avoid too great monotony in diet. There are bills offare for dyspeptics; bills of fare for consumptives; bills of fare for fatpeople, and bills of fare for thin; and bills of fare for hospitals, asylums, and prisons, as well as for gentlemen's houses. But among themall, we never saw the one which we give below. It has never been printedin any book; but it has been used in families. We are not drawing on ourimagination for its items. We have sat at such dinners; we have helpedprepare such dinners; we believe in such dinners; they are withineverybody's means. In fact, the most marvellous thing about this bill offare is that the dinner does not cost a cent. Ho! all ye that are hungryand thirsty, and would like so cheap a Christmas dinner, listen to this

BILL OF FARE FOR A CHRISTMAS DINNER. 

_First Course. _. --GLADNESS. 

This must be served hot. No two housekeepers make it alike; no fixed rulecan be given for it. It depends, like so many of the best things, chieflyon memory; but, strangely enough, it depends quite as much on properforgetting as on proper remembering. Worries must be forgotten. Troublesmust be forgotten. Yes, even sorrow itself must be denied and shut out. Perhaps this is not quite possible. Ah! we all have seen Christmas days onwhich sorrow would not leave our hearts nor our houses. But even sorrowcan be compelled to look away from its sorrowing for a festival hour whichis so solemnly joyous as Christ's Birthday. Memory can be filled full ofother things to be remembered. No soul is entirely destitute of blessings, absolutely without comfort. Perhaps we have but one. Very well; we canthink steadily of that one, if we try. But the probability is that we havemore than we can count. No man has yet numbered the blessings, themercies, the joys of God. We are all richer than we think; and if we onceset ourselves to reckoning up the things of which we are glad, we shall beastonished at their number. 

Gladness, then, is the first item, the first course on our bill of farefor a Christmas dinner. 

_Entrées_. --LOVE garnished with Smiles. 

GENTLENESS, with sweet-wine sauce of Laughter. 

GRACIOUS SPEECH, cooked with any fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need bewithout, as it keeps for years, sealed or unsealed. 

_Second Course_. --HOSPITALITY. 

The precise form of this also depends on individual preferences. We arenot undertaking here to give exact recipes, only a bill of fare. 

In some houses Hospitality is brought on surrounded with Relatives. Thisis very well. In others, it is dished up with Dignitaries of all sorts;men and women of position and estate for whom the host has special likingsor uses. This gives a fine effect to the eye, but cools quickly, and isnot in the long-run satisfying. 

In a third class, best of all, it is served in simple shapes, but with agreat variety of Unfortunate Persons, --such as lonely people fromlodging-houses, poor people of all grades, widows and childless in theiraffliction. This is the kind most preferred; in fact, never abandoned bythose who have tried it. 

_For Dessert_. --MIRTH, in glasses. 

GRATITUDE and FAITH beaten together and piled up in snowy shapes. Thesewill look light if run over night in the moulds of Solid Trust andPatience. 

A dish of the bonbons Good Cheer and Kindliness with every-day mottoes;Knots and Reasons in shape of Puzzles and Answers; the whole ornamentedwith Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, of the kind mentioned in theBook of Proverbs. 

This is a short and simple bill of fare. There is not a costly thing init; not a thing which cannot be procured without difficulty. 

If meat is desired, it can be added. That is another excellence about ourbill of fare. It has nothing in it which makes it incongruous with therichest or the plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition ofroast goose and plum-pudding; it is not harmed by the addition of herringand potatoes. Nay, it can give flavor and richness to broken bits of stalebread served on a doorstep and eaten by beggars. 

We might say much more about this bill of fare. We might, perhaps, confessthat it has an element of the supernatural; that its origin is lost inobscurity; that, although, as we said, it has never been printed before, it has been known in all ages; that the martyrs feasted upon it; thatgenerations of the poor, called blessed by Christ, have laid out banquetsby it; that exiles and prisoners have lived on it; and the despised andforsaken and rejected in all countries have tasted it. It is also truethat when any great king ate well and throve on his dinner, it was by thesame magic food. The young and the free and the glad, and all rich men incostly houses, even they have not been well fed without it. 

And though we have called it a Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner, thatis only that men's eyes may be caught by its name, and that they, thinkingit a specialty for festival, may learn and understand its secret, andhenceforth, laying all their dinners according to its magic order, may"eat unto the Lord. "

Children's Parties. 

"From six till half-past eleven. "

"German at seven, precisely. "

These were the terms of an invitation which we saw last week. It was sentto forty children, between the ages of ten and sixteen. 

"Will you allow your children to stay at this party until half-pasteleven?" we said to a mother whose children were invited. "What can I do?"she replied. "If I send the carriage for them at half-past ten, thechances are that they will not be allowed to come away. It is impossibleto break up a set. And as for that matter, half-past ten is two hours anda half past their bed-time; they might as well stay an hour longer. I wishnobody would ever ask my children to a party. I cannot keep them at home, if they are asked. Of course, I _might_; but I have not the moral courageto see them so unhappy. All the other children go; and what can I do?"

This is a tender, loving mother, whose sweet, gentle, natural methods withher children have made them sweet, gentle, natural little girls, whom itis a delight to know. But "what can she do?" The question is by no meansone which can be readily answered. It is very easy for off-hand severity, sweeping condemnation, to say, "Do! Why, nothing is plainer. Keep herchildren away from such places. Never let them go to any parties whichwill last later than nine o'clock. " This is the same thing as saying, "Never let them go to parties at all. " There are no parties which break upat nine o'clock; that is, there are not in our cities. We hope there aresuch parties still in country towns and villages, --such parties as weremember to this day with a vividness which no social enjoyments sincethen have dimmed; Saturday-afternoon parties, --_matinées_ they would havebeen called if the village people had known enough; parties which began atthree in the afternoon and ended in the early dusk, while little onescould see their way home; parties at which there was no "German, " only thesimplest of dancing, if any, and much more of blind-man's-buff; parties atwhich "mottoes" in sugar horns were the luxurious novelty, caraway cookiesthe staple, and lemonade the only drink besides pure water. Fancy offeringto the creature called child in cities to-day, lemonade and a carawaycooky and a few pink sugar horns and some walnuts and raisins to carryhome in its pocket! One blushes at thought of the scornful contempt withwhich such simples would be received, --we mean rejected!

From the party whose invitation we have quoted above the little girls camehome at midnight, radiant, flushed, joyous, looking in their floatingwhite muslin dresses like fairies, their hands loaded with bouquets ofhot-house flowers and dainty little "favors" from the German. At eleventhey had had for supper champagne and chicken salad, and all the otherunwholesome abominations which are set out and eaten in American eveningentertainments. 

Next morning there were no languid eyes, pale cheeks. Each little face waseager, bright, rosy, though the excited brain had had only five or sixhours of sleep. 

"If they only would feel tired the next day, that would be something of anargument to bring up with them, " said the poor mother. "But they alwaysdeclare that they feel better than ever. "

And so they do. But the "better" is only a deceitful sham, kept up byexcited and overwrought nerves, --the same thing that we see over and overand over again in all lives which are temporarily kindled and stimulatedby excitement of any kind. 

This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing in all ourmismanagements and perversions of the physical life of our children. Theirbeautiful elasticity and strength rebound instantly to an apparentlyuninjured fulness; and so we go on, undermining, undermining at pointafter point, until suddenly some day there comes a tragedy, a catastrophe, for which we are as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, insteadof to hasten it. Who shall say when our boys die at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, our girls either in their girlhood or in the first strain oftheir womanhood, --who shall say that they might not have passed safelythrough the dangers, had no vital force been unnecessarily wasted in theirchildhood, their infancy?

Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much investment of physicalcapital for years to come. Every hour after dark that a child is awake isjust so much capital withdrawn. Every hour that a child lives a quiet, tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on hearths, squirrelsin sunshine, is just so much investment in strength and steadiness andgrowth of the nervous system. Every hour that a child lives a life ofexcited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a ball-room, is justso much taken away from the reserved force which enables nerves to triumphthrough the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of laterlife. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonablehours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matterhow long it may be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out thatto be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transformthe apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey. Who shall saythat to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, anunwholesome supper of chicken salad and champagne may not leave as lastingeffects on the constitution of a child?

If Nature would only "execute" her "sentences against evil works" more"speedily, " evil works would not so thrive. The law of continuity is thehardest one for average men and women to comprehend, --or, at any rate, toobey. Seed-time and harvest in gardens and fields they have learned tounderstand and profit by. When we learn, also, that in the precious livesof these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, and we must reapall which we do sow, and that the emptiness or the richness of the harvestis not so much for us as for them, one of the first among the many thingswhich we shall reform will be "children's parties. "

After-Supper Talk. 

"After-dinner talk" has been thought of great importance. The expressionhas passed into literature, with many records of the good sayings itincluded. Kings and ministers condescend to make efforts at it; poets andphilosophers--greater than kings and ministers--do not disdain to attemptto shine in it. 

But nobody has yet shown what "after-supper talk" ought to be. We are notspeaking now of the formal entertainment known as "a supper;" we mean theevery-day evening meal in the every-day home, --the meal known heartily andcommonly as "supper, " among people who are neither so fashionable nor sofoolish as to take still a fourth meal at hours when they ought to beasleep in bed. 

This ought to be the sweetest and most precious hour of the day. It is toooften neglected and lost in families. It ought to be the mother's hour;the mother's opportunity to undo any mischief the day may have done, toforestall any mischief the morrow may threaten. There is an instinctivedisposition in most families to linger about the supper-table, quiteunlike the eager haste which is seen at breakfast and at dinner. Work isover for the day; everybody is tired, even the little ones who have donenothing but play. The father is ready for slippers and a comfortablechair; the children are ready and eager to recount the incidents of theday. This is the time when all should be cheered, rested, and alsostimulated by just the right sort of conversation, just the right sort ofamusement. 

The wife and mother must supply this need, must create this atmosphere. Wedo not mean that the father does not share the responsibility of this, asof every other hour. But this particular duty is one requiring qualitieswhich are more essentially feminine than masculine. It wants a light touchand an _undertone_ to bring out the full harmony of the ideal homeevening. It must not be a bore. It must not be empty; it must not be toomuch like preaching; it must not be wholly like play; more than allthings, it must not be always--no, not if it could be helped, not eventwice--the same! It must be that most indefinable, most recognizablething, "a good time. " Bless the children for inventing the phrase! It has, like all their phrases, an unconscious touch of sacred inspiration in it, in the selection of the good word "good, " which lays peculiar benedictionon all things to which it is set. 

If there were no other reason against children's having lessons assignedthem to study at home, we should consider this a sufficient one, that itrobs them of the after-supper hour with their parents. Even if theirbrains could bear without injury the sixth, seventh, or eighth hour, asit may be, of study, their hearts cannot bear the being starved. 

In the average family, this is the one only hour of the day when father, mother, and children can be together, free of cares and unhurried. Even tothe poorest laborer's family comes now something like peace and restforerunning the intermission of the night. 

Everybody who has any artistic sense recognizes this instinctively whenthey see through the open doors of humble houses the father and mother andchildren gathered around their simple supper. Its mention has alreadypassed into triteness in verse, so inevitably have poets felt the sacredcharm of the hour. 

Perhaps there is something deeper than on first thoughts would appear inthe instant sense of pleasure one has in this sight; also, in theuniversal feeling that the evening gathering of the family is the mostsacred one. Perhaps there is unconscious recognition that dangers are nearat hand when night falls, and that in this hour lies, or should lie, thespell to drive them all away. 

There is something almost terrible in the mingling of danger andprotection, of harm and help, of good and bad, in that one thing, darkness. God "giveth his beloved sleep" in it; and in it the devil setshis worst lures, by help of it gaining many a soul which he could neverget possession of in sunlight. 

Mothers, fathers! cultivate "after-supper talk;" play "after-suppergames;" keep "after-supper books;" take all the good newspapers andmagazines you can afford, and read them aloud "after supper. " Let boys andgirls bring their friends home with them at twilight, sure of a pleasantand hospitable welcome and of a good time "after supper, " and parents maylaugh to scorn all the temptations which town or village can set beforethem to draw them away from home for their evenings. 

These are but hasty hints, bare suggestions. But if they rouse one heartto a new realization of what evenings at home _ought_ to be, and whatevenings at home too often are, they have not been spoken in vain nor outof season. 

Hysteria In Literature. 

Physicians tell us that there is no known disease, no known symptom ofdisease, which hysteria cannot and does not counterfeit. Most skilfulsurgeons are misled by its cunning into believing and pronouncingable-bodied young women to be victims of spinal disease, "stricture of theoesophagus, " "gastrodynia, " "paraplegia, " "hemiplegia, " and hundreds ofother affections, with longer or shorter names. Families are thrown intodisorder and distress; friends suffer untold pains of anxiety andsympathy; doctors are summoned from far and near; and all this while thevertebra, or the membrane, or the muscle, as it may be, which is sohonestly believed to be diseased, and which shows every symptom ofdiseased action or inaction, is sound and strong, and as well able as everit was to perform its function. 

The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is familiar with, --the cryingand laughing in inappropriate places, the fancied impossibility ofbreathing, and so forth, --which make such trouble and mortification forthe embarrassed companions of hysterical persons; and which, moreover, canbe very easily suppressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied byjudicious threats or sudden use of cold water. But few people know orsuspect the number of diseases and conditions, supposed to be real, serious, often incurable, which are simply and solely, or in a great part, undetected hysteria. This very ignorance on the part of friends andrelatives makes it almost impossible for surgeons and physicians to treatsuch cases properly. The probabilities are, in nine cases out of ten, thatthe indignant family will dismiss, as ignorant or hard-hearted, anypractitioner who tells them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treatthe sufferer in accordance with it. 

In the field of literature we find a hysteria as widespread, asundetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria which skulks and conquers inthe field of disease. 

Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight and sound, and everybodyexcept the miserably ignorant and silly despises. Yet there are to befound circles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with theridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, and preposterousadventures of the heroes and heroines of the "Dime Novels" and novelettes, and the "Flags" and "Blades" and "Gazettes" among the lowest newspapers. But in well-regulated and intelligent households, this sort of writing isnot tolerated, any more than the correlative sort of physical phenomenonwould be, --the gasping, shrieking, sobbing, giggling kind of behavior in aman or woman. 

But there is another and more dangerous working of the same thing; deep, unsuspected, clothing itself with symptoms of the most defiantgenuineness, it lurks and does its business in every known field ofcomposition. Men and women are alike prone to it, though its shape issomewhat affected by sex. 

Among men it breaks out often, perhaps oftenest, in violent illusions onthe subject of love. They assert, declare, shout, sing, scream that theylove, have loved, are loved, do and for ever will love, after methods andin manners which no decent love ever thought of mentioning. And yet, sodoes their weak violence ape the bearing of strength, so much does theircheat look like truth, that scores, nay, shoals of human beings go aboutrepeating and echoing their noise, and saying, gratefully, "Yes, this islove; this is, indeed, what all true lovers must know. "

These are they who proclaim names of beloved on house-tops; who strip offveils from sacred secrets and secret sacrednesses, and set them up nakedfor the multitude to weigh and compare. What punishment is for suchbeloved, Love himself only knows. It must be in store for them somewhere. Dimly one can suspect what it might be; but it will be like all Love'strue secrets, --secret for ever. 

These men of hysteria also take up specialties of art or science; and intheir behoof rant, and exaggerate, and fabricate, and twist, and lie insuch stentorian voices that reasonable people are deafened and bewildered. 

They also tell common tales in such enormous phrases, with such giganticstructure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts tofalse-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and morediseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict whatit will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of acentury or so more of this. 

But the worst manifestations of this disease are found in so-calledreligious writing. Theology, biography, especially autobiography, didacticessays, tales with a moral, --under every one of these titles it lifts upits hateful head. It takes so successfully the guise of genuine religiousemotion, religious experience, religious zeal, that good people on allhands weep grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwholesomeutterances. Of these are many of the long and short stories setting forthin melodramatic pictures exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children;or exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet and refinedMagdalens; minute and prolonged dissections of the processes of spiritualgrowth; equally minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exercisesof all sorts, --"manuals of drill, " so to speak, or "field tactics" forsouls. Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almostindistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention andthe finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless, shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, trueenthusiasm and wise precepts. 

Where may be the remedy for this widespread and widely spreading diseaseamong writers we do not know. It is not easy to keep up courageous faiththat there is any remedy. Still Nature abhors noise and haste, and shamsof all sorts. Quiet and patience are the great secrets of her force, whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion. We must believethat sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall haveits dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic, spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it issilly. But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extremecontagiousness. All physicians know what a disastrous effect onehysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. Weremember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of awoman who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough. Herlungs, bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition; but she coughedalmost incessantly, especially on the approach of the hour for thedoctor's visit to the ward. In less than one week half the women in theward had similar coughs. A single--though it must be confessed ratherterrific--application of cold water to the original offender worked asimultaneous cure upon her and all of her imitators. 

Not long ago a very parallel thing was to be observed in the field ofstory-writing. A clever, though morbid and melodramatic writer published anovel, whose heroine, having once been an inmate of a house of ill-fame, escaped, and, finding shelter and Christian training in the home of abenevolent woman, became a model of womanly delicacy, and led a life ofexquisite and artistic refinement. As to the animus and intent of thisstory there could be no doubt; both were good, but in atmosphere andexecution it was essentially unreal, overwrought, and melodramatic. Forthree or four months after its publication there was a perfect outburstand overflow in newspapers and magazines of the lower order of stories, all more or less bad, some simply outrageous, and all treating, or ratherpretending to treat, the same problem which had furnished theme for thatnovel. 

Probably a close observation and collecting of the dreary statistics wouldbring to light a curious proof of the extent and certainty of this sort ofcontagion. 

Reflecting on it, having it thrust in one's face at every book-counter, railway-stand, Sunday-school library, and parlor centre-table, it is hardnot to wish for some supernatural authority to come sweeping through thewards, and prescribe sharp cold-water treatment all around to half drownall such writers and quite drown all their books!

Jog Trot. 

There is etymological uncertainty about the phrase. But there is no doubtabout its meaning; no doubt that it represents a good, comfortable gait, at which nobody goes nowadays. 

A hundred years ago it was the fashion: in the days when railroads werenot, nor telegraphs; when citizens journeyed in stages, putting up prayersin church if their journey were to be so long as from Massachusetts intoConnecticut; when evil news travelled slowly by letter, and good news wascarried about by men on horses; when maidens spun and wove for long, quiet, silent years at their wedding _trousseaux_, and mothers spun andwove all which sons and husbands wore; when newspapers were small andinfrequent, dingy-typed and wholesomely stupid, so that no man could orwould learn from them more about other men's opinions, affairs, oroccupations than it concerned his practical convenience to know; when evenwars were waged at slow pace, --armies sailing great distances by chancewinds, or plodding on foot for thousands of miles, and fighting doggedlyhand to hand at sight; when fortunes also were slowly made by simple, honest growths, --no men excepting freebooters and pirates becoming richin a day. 

It would seem treason or idiocy to sigh for these old days, --treason toideas of progress, stupid idiocy unaware that it is well off. Is notto-day brilliant, marvellous, beautiful? Has not living become subject toa magician's "presto"? Are we not decked in the whole of color, feasted onall that shape and sound and flavor can give? Are we not wiser each momentthan we were the moment before? Do not the blind see, the deaf hear, andthe crippled dance? Has not Nature surrendered to us? Art and science, arethey not our slaves, --coining money and running mills? Have we not builtand multiplied religions, till each man, even the most irreligious, canhave his own? Is not what is called the "movement of the age" going on atthe highest rate of speed and of sound? Shall we complain that we aremaddened by the racket, out of breath with the spinning and whirling, anddying of the strain of it all? What is a man, more or less? What are onehundred and twenty millions of men, more or less? What is quiet incomparison with riches? or digestion and long life in comparison withknowledge? When we are added up in the universal reckoning of races, therewill be small mention of individuals. Let us be disinterested. Let ussacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the generalaverage of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark. Tobe sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we areHuxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shallultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below usstand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning toturn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we havebrethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generouslyappreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, letus never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and enviousmisgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of theCreator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of allwhich created intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best ofdyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children. Perhaps wecan do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could inseventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children thatlive to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers. It is a comfort to believe, as we are told, that the world can never losean iota that it has gained; that progress is the great law of theuniverse. It is consoling to verify this truth by looking backward, andseeing how each age has made use of the wrecks of the preceding one asmaterial for new structures on different plans. What are we that we shouldmention our preference for being put to some other use, more immediatelyremunerative to ourselves!

We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy with the age in which welive. We might as well be dead as not keep up with it. But which of usdoes not sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been born longenough ago to have been boon companion of his great-grandfather, and havegone respectably and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot?

The Joyless American. 

It is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching these shores, mightsuppose that he had chanced to arrive upon a day when some great publiccalamity had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be quite safe toassume that out of the first five hundred faces which he sees there willnot be ten wearing a smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if theyever could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to any man, let himtry the experiment, for one week, of noting down, in his walks about town, every face he sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The chancesare that at the end of his seven days he will not have entered seven facesin his note-book without being aware at the moment of some conscientiousdifficulty in permitting himself to call them positively and unmistakablycheerful. 

The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression on the American face isso common that we are hardened to seeing it, and look for nothing better. Only when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy or girl or manor woman flashes the beam of a laughing countenance into the level gloomdo we even know that we are in the dark. Witness the instant effect ofthe entrance of such a person into an omnibus or a car. Who has notobserved it? Even the most stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. Theunconscious intruder, simply by smiling, has set the blood moving morequickly in the veins of every human being who sees him. He is, for themoment, the personal benefactor of every one; if he had handed about moneyor bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less value. 

What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of misery from becoming anorganic characteristic of our people? "Make them play more, " says onephilosophy. No doubt they need to "play more;" but, when one looks at theaverage expression of a Fourth of July crowd, one doubts if ever so muchmultiplication of that kind of holiday would mend the matter. No doubt wework for too many days in the year, and play for too few; but, after all, it is the heart and the spirit and the expression that we bring to ourwork, and not those that we bring to our play, by which our real vitalitymust be tested and by which our faces will be stamped. If we do not workhealthfully, reasoningly, moderately, thankfully, joyously, we shall haveneither moderation nor gratitude nor joy in our play. And here is thehopelessness, here is the root of the trouble, of the joyless Americanface. The worst of all demons, the demon of unrest and overwork, broods inthe very sky of this land. Blue and clear and crisp and sparkling as ouratmosphere is, it cannot or does not exorcise the spell. Any old man cancount on the fingers of one hand the persons he has known who led lives ofserene, unhurried content, made for themselves occupations and not tasks, and died at last what might be called natural deaths. 

"What, then?" says the congressional candidate from Mettibemps; the "newcontributor" to the oceanic magazine; Mrs. Potiphar, from behind herliveries; and poor Dives, senior, from Wall Street; "Are we to give up allambition?" God forbid. But, because one has a goal, must one be torn bypoisoned spurs? We see on the Corso, in the days of the Carnival, whatspeed can be made by horses under torture. Shall we try those methods andthat pace on our journeys?

So long as the American is resolved to do in one day the work of two, tomake in one year the fortune of his whole life and his children's, to earnbefore he is forty the reputation which belongs to threescore and ten, solong he will go about the streets wearing his present abject, pitiable, overwrought, joyless look. But, even without a change of heart or a reformof habits, he might better his countenance a little, if he would. Even ifhe does not feel like smiling, he might smile, if he tried; and that wouldbe something. The muscles are all there; they count the same in theAmerican as in the French or the Irish face; they relax easily in youth;the trick can be learned. And even a trick of it is better than none ofit. Laughing masters might be as well paid as dancing masters to help onsociety! "Smiling made Easy" or the "Complete Art of LookingGood-natured" would be as taking titles on book-sellers' shelves as "TheComplete Letter-writer" or "Handbook of Behavior. " And nobody cancalculate what might be the moral and spiritual results if it could onlybecome the fashion to pursue this branch of the fine arts. Surliness ofheart must melt a little under the simple effort to smile. A man willinevitably be a little less of a bear for trying to wear the face of aChristian. 

"He who laughs can commit no deadly sin, " said the wise and sweet-heartedwoman who was mother of Goethe. 

Spiritual Teething

Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teethmust be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but theprocesses are wonderfully parallel, --the results too, alas! If clergymenknew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do ofdisease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end ofeach year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality inBrooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th. " Weare so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eyeglances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens andby scores they have gone, --the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds newmourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiarwith black as with scarlet, with the hearse as with the pleasure-carriage;and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can bemerry. 

But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, ourhearts would break. The air would be dark and stifling. We should beafraid to move, --lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor'sspiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously spoken the one wordwhich was poison to his fever!

Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than half take place inthe period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closerit looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; whichknows but three things, --hunger and food and sleep! There is only a littlespace for this delight. In our seventh month we begin to be wretched. Wedrink our milk, but we are aware of a constant desire to bite; doubtswhich we do not know by name, needs for which there is no ready supply, make us restless. Now comes the old-school doctor, and thrusts in hislancet too soon. We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved. Thetooth is said to be "through. "

Through! Oh, yes; through before its time. Through to no purpose. In aweek, or a year, the wounded flesh, or soul, has reasserted its right, shut down on the tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrizedcrust, out of which it will take double time and double strength for thetooth to break. 

The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a bad taste; or an ivoryone, it is too hard and hurts us. But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the newpain a little easier to bear than the old. Probably it is; probably thetooth gets through a little quicker for the days and nights of gnawing. But what a picture of patient misery is a baby with its rubber ring!Really one sees sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face suchgrotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness to the soul'sprocesses of grappling with problems, that it is uncanny. 

When we come to the analysis of the diseases incident to the teethingperiod, and the treatment of them, the similitude is as close. 

We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadlythings, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, toolate to cure them, --like water on the brain; and we have slow wastingsaway; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough toprolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths. 

Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these, --outbreaks ofrebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptionsof perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down intoindifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?

These are they who live. Shall we say any thing of those of us who diebetween our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month? They never put onbabies' tombstones "Died of teething. " There is always a special name forthe special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days. But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been forthe teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup wouldnot have killed the child. 

Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so closeas to be ludicrous. The lancet and the rubber ring fail. We are stillrestless, and scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk withus; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they jounce usfrom top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies isnot displaced. They beat on glass and tin and iron to distract ourattention and drown out our noise by a bigger one; they shake back andforth before our eyes all things that glitter and blaze; they shout andsing songs; the house and the neighborhood are searched and racked forsomething which will "amuse" the baby. Then, when we will no longer be"amused, " and when all this restlessness outside and around us, added tothe restlessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and the dayor the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly over, their strengthworn out, and their wits at end, --then comes the "soothing syrup, "deadliest weapon of all. This we cannot resist. If there be they who aremighty enough to pour it down our throats, physically or spiritually, tosleep we must go, and asleep we must stay so long as the effect of thedose lasts. 

It is of this, we oftenest die, --not in a day or a year, but after manydays and many years; when in some sharp crisis we need for our salvationthe force which should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle orthe nerve which should have been steadily growing strong till that moment. But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; andwe die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under suddengrief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups whenwe were babies. 

Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in thenatural ways. Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on oneside; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possiblefor love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only animal that has troublefrom the growing of the teeth in his body. It must be his own faultsomehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of alikeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural tohis body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible andjust opinions; for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that ashrewd man is a man who has "cut his eye-teeth;" and the four last teeth, which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of realillness, are called in all tongues, all countries, "wisdom teeth!"

Glass Houses. 

Who would live in one, if he could help it? And who wants to throw stones?

But who lives in any thing else, nowadays? And how much better off arethey who never threw a stone in their lives than the rude mob who throwthem all the time?

Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from our books anddropped from our speech. It has no longer use or meaning. 

It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, or rather what canbe done, to secure to fastidious people some show and shadow of privacy intheir homes. The silly and vulgar passion of people for knowing all abouttheir neighbors' affairs, which is bad enough while it takes shape merelyin idle gossip of mouth, is something terrible when it is exalted into aregular market demand of the community, and fed by a regular market supplyfrom all who wish to print what the community will read. 

We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the buyer or the seller; wethink, on the whole, the buyer. But then he is again a seller; and sothere it is, --wheel within wheel, cog upon cog. And, since all thesesellers must earn their bread and butter, the more one searches for a fairpoint of attacking the evil, the more he is perplexed. 

The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his work, write what the manwho prints will buy. The man who prints must print what the people whoread will buy. Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest hands? Clearly, uponthe last buyer, --upon him who reads. But things have come to such a passalready that to point out to the average American that it is vulgar andalso unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details abouthis neighbors' business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out tothe currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire andstrychnine upon mucous membranes. The diseased palate craves what has madeit diseased, --craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stomachs, Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abusesto a stand-still, --dyspepsia, and delirium-tremens, and so on. 

But she takes no account, apparently, of the diseased conditions of brainsincident to the long use of unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food. Perhaps she never anticipated this class of excesses. And, if there wereto be a precisely correlative punishment, it is to be feared it would fallmore heavily on the least guilty offender. It is not hard to fancy a poorsoul who, having been condemned to do reporters' duty for some years, andhaving been forced to dwell and dilate upon scenes and details which hisvery soul revolted from mentioning, --it is not hard to fancy such a soulvisited at last by a species of delirium-tremens, in which the speeches ofmen who had spoken, the gowns of women who had danced, the faces, thefigures, the furniture of celebrities, should all be mixed up in agrotesque phantasmagoria of torture, before which he should writhe ashelplessly and agonizingly as the poor whiskey-drinker before his snakes. But it would be a cruel misplacement of punishment. All the while the trueguilty would be placidly sitting down at still further unsavory banquets, which equally helpless providers were driven to furnish!

The evil is all the harder to deal with, also, because it is like so manyevils, --all, perhaps, --only a diseased outgrowth, from a legitimate andjustifiable thing. It is our duty to sympathize; it is our privilege andpleasure to admire. No man lives to himself alone; no man can; no manought. It is right that we should know about our neighbors all which willhelp us to help them, to be just to them, to avoid them, if need be; inshort, all which we need to know for their or our reasonable and fairadvantage. It is right, also, that we should know about men who are orhave been great all which can enable us to understand their greatness; toprofit, to imitate, to revere; all that will help us to remember whateveris worth remembering. There is education in this; it is experience, it ishistory. 

But how much of what is written, printed, and read to-day about the menand women of to-day comes under these heads? It is unnecessary to do morethan ask the question. It is still more unnecessary to do more than askhow many of the men and women of to-day, whose names have become almost asstereotyped a part of public journals as the very titles of the journalsthemselves, have any claim to such prominence. But all theseconsiderations seem insignificant by side of the intrinsic one of thevulgarity of the thing, and its impudent ignoring of the most sacredrights of individuals. That there are here and there weak fools who liketo see their names and most trivial movements chronicled in newspaperscannot be denied. But they are few. And their silly pleasure is very smallin the aggregate compared with the annoyance and pain suffered bysensitive and refined people from these merciless invasions of theirprivacy. No precautions can forestall them, no reticence prevent; nothing, apparently, short of dying outright, can set one free. And even then it ismerely leaving the torture behind, a harrowing legacy to one's friends;for tombs are even less sacred than houses. Memory, friendship, obligation, --all are lost sight of in the greed of desire to make aneffective sketch, a surprising revelation, a neat analysis, or perhaps anadroit implication of honor to one's self by reason of an old associationwith greatness. Private letters and private conversations, which may touchliving hearts in a thousand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as ifthey had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the hands of thepawn-broker! "Dead men tell no tales, " says the proverb. One wishes theycould! We should miss some spicy contributions to magazine and newspaperliterature; and a sudden silence would fall upon some loud-mouthed living. 

But we despair of any cure for this evil. No ridicule, no indignationseems to touch it. People must make the best they can of their glasshouses; and, if the stones come too fast, take refuge in the cellars. 

The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism. 

The old-clothes business has never been considered respectable. It issupposed to begin and to end with cheating; it deals with very dirtythings. It would be hard to mention a calling of lower repute. From themen who come to your door with trays of abominable china vases on theirheads, and are ready to take any sort of rags in payment for them, down--or up?--to the bigger wretches who advertise that "ladies andgentlemen can obtain the highest price for their cast-off clothing bycalling at No. So and so, on such a street, " they are all alike odious anddespicable. 

We wonder when we find anybody who is not an abject Jew, engaged in thebusiness. We think we can recognize the stamp of the disgusting traffic ontheir very faces. It is by no means uncommon to hear it said of a sorrysneak, "He looks like an old-clothes dealer. "

But what shall we say of the old-clothes mongers in journalism? By thevery name we have defined, described them, and pointed them out. If onlywe could make the name such a badge of disgrace that every member of thefraternity should forthwith betake him or herself to some sort of honestlabor!

These are they who crowd the columns of our daily newspapers with thedreary, monotonous, worthless, scandalous tales of what other men andwomen did, are doing, or will do, said, say, or will say, wore, wear, orwill wear, thought, think, or will think, ate, eat, or will eat, drank, drink, or will drink: and if there be any other verb coming under the headof "to do, to be, to suffer, " add that to the list, and the old-clothesmonger will furnish you with something to fill out the phrase. 

These are they who patch out their miserable, little, sham "properties"for mock representations of life, by scraps from private letters, bits ofconversation overheard on piazzas, in parlors, in bedrooms, by odds andends of untrustworthy statements picked up at railway-stations, church-doors, and offices of all sorts, by impudent inferences andsuppositions, and guesses about other people's affairs, by garblings andpartial quotings, and, if need be, by wholesale lyings. 

The trade is on the increase, --rapidly, fearfully on the increase. Everylarge city, every summer watering-place, is more or less infested withthis class of dealers. The goods they have to furnish are more and more indemand. There is hardly a journal in the country but has column aftercolumn full of their tattered wares; there is hardly a man or woman in thecountry but buys them. 

There is, perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has not yet shed all themonkey. A lingering and grovelling baseness in the average heart delightsin this sort of cast-off clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade mustcontinue, can we not insist that the profits be shared? If A is to receiveten dollars for quoting B's remarks at a private dinner yesterday, shallnot B have a small percentage on the sale? Clearly, this is only justice. And in cases where the wares are simply stolen, shall there be no redress?Here is an opening for a new Bureau. How well its advertisements wouldread:--

"Ladies and gentlemen wishing to dispose of their old opinions, sentiments, feelings, and so forth, and also of the more interesting factsin their personal history, can obtain good prices for the same at No. --Tittle-tattle street. Inquire at the door marked 'Regular and SpecialCorrespondence. '

"N. B. --Persons willing to be reported _verbatim_ will receive especialconsideration. "

We commend this brief suggestion of a new business to all who are anxiousto make a living and not particular how they make it. Perhaps the class ofwhom we have been speaking would find it profitable to set it up as abranch of their own calling. It is quite possible that nobody else in thecountry would like to meddle with it. 

The Country Landlord's Side. 

It is only one side, to be sure. But it is the side of which we hearleast. The quarrel is like all quarrels, --it takes two to make it; butas, of those two, one is only one, and the other is from ten to a hundred, it is easy to see which side will do most talking in setting forth itsgrievances. 

"It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; and when he is gone his waythen he boasteth. " We are oftener reminded of this text of Scripture thanof any other when we listen to conversations in regard to boarders incountry houses. 

"Oh, let me tell you of such a nice place we have found to board in thecountry. It is only--miles from Mt. --or--Lake; the drives are delightful, and board is only $7 a week. "

"Is the table a good one?"

"Oh, yes; very good for the country. We had good butter and milk, and eggsin abundance. Meats, of course, are never very good in the country. Buteverybody gained a pound a week; and we are going again this year, if theyhave not raised their prices. "

Then this model of a city woman, in search of country lodgings, sits downand writes to the landlord:--

"Dear Sir, --We would like to secure our old rooms in your house for thewhole of July and August. As we shall remain so long a time, we hope youmay be willing to count all the children at half-price. Last year, you mayremember, we paid full price for the two eldest, the twins, who are notyet quite fourteen. I hope, also, that Mrs. ---- has better arrangementsfor washing this summer, and will allow us to have our own servant to dothe washing for the whole family. If these terms suit you, the price formy family--eight children, myself, and servant--would be $38. 50 a week. Perhaps, if the servant takes the entire charge of my rooms, you wouldcall it $37; as, of course, that would save the time of your ownservants. "

Then the country landlord hesitates. He is not positively sure of fillingall his rooms for the season. Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, hethinks, better than nothing. In his simplicity, he supposes that, if heconfers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs. ----, by receiving her greatfamily on such low terms, she will be thoroughly well disposed toward himand his house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter ofaccommodations. In an evil hour, he consents; they come, and he begins toreap his reward. The twins are stout boys, as large as men, and muchhungrier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, and requiresespecial diet, which must be prepared at especial and inconvenient hours, in the crowded little kitchen. The other five children are average boysand girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat certainly as much asfive grown people, and make twice as much trouble. The servant is a slow, inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four daysin doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortableand cross. 

If this were all; but this is not. Mrs. ----, who writes to all her friendsboastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gainsby the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habituallyfinds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with therag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately heldresponsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boardedin country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Everycountry landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters stillmore exacting and unreasonable. 

The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goesexpecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they shouldhave. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and abell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed inhis sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head outsnappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chancepassers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"

If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor, and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peaswill be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for thesummer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could puther to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects, will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with thesilent respectfulness of a trained city servant. 

This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summerhundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumblingabout country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouragedwives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at last emptied, andvow a vow that never again will they take "city folks to board. " But thegreat law of supply and demand is too strong for them. The city must comeout of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight forits eyes, and rest for its overworked brain. The country must open itsarms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And so the summersand the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land thevoices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating. We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords. The average countrylandlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to bemade "off boarders" is so moderate and simple that the keepers of cityboarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn. If this were not so, would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or adollar and a half a day? Neither does he dream of asking them, even atthis low price, to fare as he fares. The "Excelsior" mattresses, at whichthey cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw"tick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly. He has paid$4. 50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understandscity prejudice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets are holidayadorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family. He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and nobody can understand theimportance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-porkand codfish in our rural districts. That the meat is tough, pale, stringyis not his fault; no other is to be bought. Stetson, himself, if he dealtwith this country butcher, could do no better. Vegetables? Yes, he hasplanted them. If we look out of our windows, we can see them on theirwinding way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted peas in his lifebefore the Fourth of July, or cucumbers before the middle of August. Hehears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be "dreadfulunhealthy, them things forced out of season, "--and, whether healthy ornot, he can't get them. We couldn't ourselves, if we were keeping house inthe same township. To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, andbe served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterlyunfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double theirmarket price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing. We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce, " or even driedapples. We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he doesnot know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best. As forsaleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, andubiquitous pickles, --all those things have he, and his fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listenincredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change offats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c. ;for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he maybe too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, havingfed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and hiswife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while oursmust lie down and rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what hecan to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the country boarding-housewhere kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridironand banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread. Good, patient, long-suffering country people! The only wonder to us isthat they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, thepreferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remainstrangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first tolast as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any commonbonds of humanity and Christianity. 

The Good Staff of Pleasure. 

In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for threeweeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid calledGretchen. She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passagewaywhich communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the inn. From one or other of these quartersGretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how shecontrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day. Poor child! I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for Isometimes left her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She wasblanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight. I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of afull breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face. 

But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failinggood-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning. " Her uniformatmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, Isaid to Franz, the head waiter, --

"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing inthat narrow dark place, washing dishes. "

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged hisshoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, andadded, --

"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no onewhich will say not nothing if they go by. "

That was it. Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her, "Good-morning, Gretchen, " or "It is a fine day;" or, if no word werespoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere inkind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass by other human beings, as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to showrecognition of humanity in common. 

This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparativelyglad. Her body suffered for want of sun and air. There was no helpingthat, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand, year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery. But, if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, andhad had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in threemonths. 

If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a smallpleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodiesand souls both would bear up under living! Sensitive people realize it tothe very core of their being. They know that often and often it happensto them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they couldnot describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some littlething, --some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof ofaffection or recognition. They know, too, that strength goes out of them, just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even ashort space, all these are wanting. 

People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they aretender. They are by no means inseparable, --tenderness and sensitiveness;if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and moreagreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; livingin close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far asthey can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow alittle weary. 

We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because oneover-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonishedthan the rest. But she has her reward for every effort to adjust hermethods to the instrument she does not quite understand. If she doubtsthis, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see theeffect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures. 

We see, also, many men, --good, generous, kindly, but notsensitive-souled, --who have learned that the sunshine of their homes alldepends on little things, which it would never have entered into theirbusy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, ifthey had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with themthey keep well. 

People who are neither tender nor sensitive can neither comprehend normeet these needs. Alas! that there are so many such people; or that, ifthere must be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are notdistinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or shape, or sound, so that one might avoid them, or at least know what to expect in enteringinto relation with them. Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, inspite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and intimate intercoursewith such! No bravery, no philosophy, no patience can save it from a slowdeath. But, while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which thesoul knows come to it through its affections, and are, therefore, so tospeak, at every man's mercy, there is still left a world of possibility ofenjoyment, to which we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder. 

And just here it is, I think, that many persons, especially those who arehard-worked, and those who have some special trouble to bear, make greatmistake. They might, perhaps, say at hasty first sight that it would beselfish to aim at providing themselves with pleasures. Not at all. Not onewhit more than it is for them to buy a bottle of Ayer's Sarsaparilla (ifthey do not know better) to "cleanse their blood" in the spring! Probablya dollar's worth of almost any thing out of any other shop than adruggist's would "cleanse their blood" better, --a geranium, for instance, or a photograph, or a concert, or a book, or even fried oysters, --anything, no matter what, so it is innocent, which gives them a littlepleasure, breaks in on the monotony of their work or their trouble, andmakes them have for one half-hour a "good time. " Those who have near anddear ones to remember these things for them need no such words as I amwriting here. Heaven forgive them if, being thus blessed, they do notthank God daily and take courage. 

But lonely people, and people whose kin are not kind or wise in thesethings, must learn to minister even in such ways to themselves. It is notselfish. It is not foolish. It is wise. It is generous. Each contentedlook on a human face is reflected in every other human face which sees it;each growth in a human soul is a blessing to every other human soul whichcomes in contact with it. 

Here will come in, for many people, the bitter restrictions of poverty. There are so many men and women to whom it would seem simply a taunt toadvise them to spend, now and then, a dollar for a pleasure. That the poormust go cold and hungry has never seemed to me the hardest feature intheir lot; there are worse deprivations than that of food or raiment, andthis very thing is one of them. This is a point for charitable people toremember, even more than they do. 

We appreciate this when we give some plum-pudding and turkey at Christmas, instead of all coal and flannel. But, any day in the year, a picture onthe wall might perhaps be as comforting as a blanket on the bed; and, atany rate, would be good for twelve months, while the blanket would helpbut six. I have seen an Irish mother, in a mud hovel, turn red withdelight at a rattle for her baby, when I am quite sure she would have beenindifferently grateful for a pair of socks. 

Food and physicians and money are and always will be on the earth. But a"merry heart" is a "continual feast, " and "doeth good like-a medicine;"and "loving favor" is "chosen, " "rather than gold and silver. "

Wanted. --A Home. 

Nothing can be meaner than that "Misery should love company. " But theproverb is founded on an original principle in human nature, which it isno use to deny and hard work to conquer. I have been uneasily conscious ofthis sneaking sin in my own soul, as I have read article after article inthe English newspapers and magazines on the "decadence of the home spiritin English family life, as seen in the large towns and the metropolis. " Itseems that the English are as badly off as we. There, also, men arewide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy and morose in their ownhouses; "sons lead lives independent of their fathers and apart from theirsisters and mothers;" "girls run about as they please, without care orguidance. " This state of things is "a spreading social evil, " and men areat their wit's end to know what is to be done about it. They areransacking "national character and customs, religion, and the particulartendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teachingand preaching of the public press, " to find out the root of the trouble. One writer ascribes it to the "exceeding restlessness and the desire to bedoing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxonrace;" another to the passion which almost all families have for seemingricher and more fashionable than their means will allow. In these, and inmost of their other theories, they are only working round and round, asdoctors so often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, withoutso much as touching or perhaps suspecting their real centre. How manypeople are blistered for spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, whenthe real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in the lining ofthe stomach! and all these difficulties in the outworks are merely thecreaking of the machinery, because the central engine does not workproperly. Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years coddling thepoor victim; but he will stay ill to the last if his stomach be not setright. 

There is a close likeness between the doctor's high-sounding list ofremote symptoms, which he is treating as primary diseases, and the hue andoutcry about the decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of excessiveand improper amusements, club-houses, billiard-rooms, theatres, and soforth, which are "the banes of homes. "

The trouble is in the homes. Homes are stupid, homes are dreary, homes areinsufferable. If one can be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying, homes are their own worst "banes. " If homes were what they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, whichwould do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, their pleasanter ways, their wholesomer joys. 

Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a heavy word. Itincludes generations in its pitiless entail. Sufficient for the day is theevil thereof is but one side of the truth. No day is sufficient unto theevil thereof is the other. Each day has to bear burdens passed down fromso many other days; each person has to bear burdens so complicated, sointerwoven with the burdens of others; each person's fault is so feveredand swollen by faults of others, that there is no disentangling thequestion of responsibility. Every thing is everybody's fault is thesimplest and fairest way of putting it. It is everybody's fault that theaverage home is stupid, dreary, insufferable, --a place from which fathersfly to clubs, boys and girls to streets. But when we ask who can do mostto remedy this, --in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight againstthe tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instability which are inherentin human nature, --then the answer is clear and loud. It is the work ofwomen; this is the true mission of women, their "right" divine andunquestionable, and including most emphatically the "right to labor. "

To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home, --it is easily said in avery few words; but how many women have done it? How many women can say tothemselves or others that this is their aim? To keep house well womenoften say they desire. But keeping house well is another affair, --I hadalmost said it has nothing to do with creating a home. That is not true, of course; comfortable living, as regards food and fire and clothes, cando much to help on a home. Nevertheless, with one exception, the besthomes I have ever seen were in houses which were not especially well kept;and the very worst I have ever known were presided (I mean tyrannized)over by "perfect housekeepers. "

All creators are single-aimed. Never will the painter, sculptor, writerlose sight of his art. Even in the intervals of rest and diversion whichare necessary to his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers tohis passion. Consciously or unconsciously, he makes each shape, color, incident his own; sooner or later it will enter into his work. 

So it must be with the woman who will create a home. There is an evilfashion of speech which says it is a narrowing and narrow life that awoman leads who cares only, works only for her husband and children; thata higher, more imperative thing is that she herself be developed to herutmost. Even so clear and strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in herotherwise admirable essay on the "Final Cause of Woman, " falls into thisshallowness of words, and speaks of women who live solely for theirfamilies as "adjectives. "

In the family relation so many women are nothing more, so many womenbecome even less, that human conception may perhaps be forgiven for losingsight of the truth, the ideal. Yet in women it is hard to forgive it. Thinking clearly, she should see that a creator can never be an adjective;and that a woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose handschildren grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator, secondonly to God. 

Before she can do this, she must have development; in and by the doing ofthis comes constant development; the higher her development, the moreperfect her work; the instant her own development is arrested, hercreative power stops. All science, all art, all religion, all experienceof life, all knowledge of men--will help her; the stars in their coursescan be won to fight for her. Could she attain the utmost of knowledge, could she have all possible human genius, it would be none too much. Reverence holds its breath and goes softly, perceiving what it is in thiswoman's power to do; with what divine patience, steadfastness, andinspiration she must work. 

Into the home she will create, monotony, stupidity, antagonisms cannotcome. Her foresight will provide occupations and amusements; her lovingand alert diplomacy will fend off disputes. Unconsciously, every member ofher family will be as clay in her hands. More anxiously than any statesmanwill she meditate on the wisdom of each measure, the bearing of each word. The least possible governing which is compatible with order will be herfirst principle; her second, the greatest possible influence which iscompatible with the growth of individuality. Will the woman whose brainand heart are working these problems, as applied to a household, be anadjective? be idle?

She will be no more an adjective than the sun is an adjective in thesolar system; no more idle than Nature is idle. She will be perplexed; shewill be weary; she will be disheartened, sometimes. All creators, saveOne, have known these pains and grown strong by them. But she will neverwithdraw her hand for one instant. Delays and failures will only set herto casting about for new instrumentalities. She will press all things intoher service. She will master sciences, that her boys' evenings need not bedull. She will be worldly wise, and render to Caesar his dues, that herhusband and daughters may have her by their side in all their pleasures. She will invent, she will surprise, she will forestall, she will remember, she will laugh, she will listen, she will be young, she will be old, andshe will be three times loving, loving, loving. 

This is too hard? There is the house to be kept? And there are poverty andsickness, and there is not time?

Yes, it is hard. And there is the house to be kept; and there are povertyand sickness; but, God be praised, there is time. A minute is time. In oneminute may live the essence of all. I have seen a beggar-woman make halfan hour of home on a doorstep, with a basket of broken meat! And the mostperfect home I ever saw was in a little house into the sweet incense ofwhose fires went no costly things. A thousand dollars served for a year'sliving of father, mother, and three children. But the mother was a creatorof a home; her relation with her children was the most beautiful I haveever seen; even a dull and commonplace man was lifted up and enabled todo good work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman created; everyinmate of her house involuntarily looked into her face for the key-note ofthe day; and it always rang clear. From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which, in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our platesat breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read ordiscussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence. Shehas always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker. If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added theappliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers wouldhave been absolutely the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I haveever seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold. Ido not know whether she is living or not. But, as I see house after housein which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives ina hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, Ialways think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, andof the woman who was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of manymen and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspapercolumns of "Personals, " "Wanted, --a home. "