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

Then I said some words to you, which you thought were unjust.  I asked you in what condition your own nerves would have been by ten o’clock that morning if your husband (who had, in one view, a much better right to thwart your harmless desires than you had to thwart your child’s, since you, in the full understanding of maturity, gave yourself into his hands) had, instead of admiring your pretty white dress, told you to be more prudent, and not put it on; had told you it would be nonsense to have breakfast out on the piazza; and that he could not wait for you to walk to the 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 have been to you only the comparative trifles of one short day, and would have made you only a little cross and uncomfortable; whereas to little Blue Eyes they were the all-absorbing desires of the hour, which, to a child in trouble, always looks as if it could never come to an end, and would never be followed by any thing better.

Blue Eyes cried herself to sleep, and slept heavily till late in the afternoon.  When her father came home, you said that she must not have the red balloon, because she had been such a naughty girl.  I have wondered many times since why she did not cry again, or look grieved when you said that, and laid the balloon away.  After eleven o’clock at night, I went to look at her, and found her sobbing in her sleep, and tossing about.  I groaned as I thought, “This is only one day, and there are three hundred and sixty-five in a year!” But I never recall the distorted face of that poor child, as, in her fearful passion, she told you she wished you were dead, without also remembering that even the gentle Christ said of him who should offend one of these little ones, “It were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depths of the sea!”

The Inhumanities of Parents—­Rudeness.

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  “Inhumanity—­Cruelty. Cruelty—­The disposition to give unnecessary
  pain.”—­Webster’s Dict.
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I had intended to put third on the list of inhumanities of parents “needless requisitions;” but my last summer’s observations changed my estimate, and convinced me that children suffer more pain from the rudeness with which they are treated than from being forced to do needless things which they dislike.  Indeed, a positively and graciously courteous manner toward children is a thing so rarely seen in average daily life, the rudenesses which they receive are so innumerable, that it is hard to tell where to begin in setting forth the evil.  Children themselves often bring their sharp and unexpected logic to bear on some incident illustrating the difference in this matter of behavior between what is required from them