With some parents, although they are neither harsh nor hard in manner, nor yet 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 can be, of any consequence to a child whether it does or does not do the thing it desires.  Often the refusal is withdrawn on the first symptom of grief or disappointment on the child’s part; a thing which is fatal to all real control of a child, and almost as unkind as the first unnecessary denial,—­perhaps even more so, as it involves double and treble pains, in future instances, where there cannot and must not be any giving way to entreaties.  It is doubtless this lack of perception,—­akin, one would think, to color-blindness,—­which is at the bottom of this great and common inhumanity among kind and intelligent fathers and mothers:  an inhumanity so common that it may almost be said to be universal; so common that, while we are obliged to look on and see our dearest friends guilty of it, we find it next to impossible to make them understand what we mean when we make outcry over some of its glaring instances.

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

It was one of those ineffable mornings, when a thrill of delight and expectancy fills the air; one felt that every appointment of the day must be unlike those of other days,—­must be festive, must help on the “white day” for which all things looked ready.  I remember how like the morning itself you looked as you stood in the doorway, in a fresh white muslin dress, with lavender ribbons.  I said, “Oh, extravagance!  For breakfast!”

“I know,” you said; “but the day was so enchanting, I could not make up my mind to wear any thing that had been worn before.”  Here an uproar from the nursery broke out, and we both ran to the spot.  There stood little Blue Eyes, in a storm of temper, with one small foot on a crumpled mass of pink cambric 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 not quite 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 Blue Eyes pain; so you knelt down beside her, and told her that she must be a good girl, and have on the gown Mary had said, but that she should have on a pretty white apron, which would hide the spots.  And Blue Eyes, being only six years old, and of a loving, generous nature, dried her tears, accepted the very questionable expedient, tried to