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But now, my reader, I am going to stop.  I have a great deal more marked down to say; but the subject is growing so thoroughly distressing to me, as I go on, that I shall go on no farther.  It would make me sour and wretched for the next week, if I were to state and illustrate the varied sorrows of childhood of which I intended yet to speak:  and if I were to talk out my heart to you about the people who cause these, I fear my character for good-nature would be gone with you forever.  “This genial writer,” as the newspapers call me, would show but little geniality:  I am aware, indeed, that I have already been writing in a style which, to say the least, is snappish.  So I shall say nothing of the first death that comes in the family in our childish days,—­its hurry, its confusion, its awe-struck mystery, its wonderfully vivid recalling of the words and looks of the dead; nor of the terrible trial to a little child of being sent away from home to school,—­the heart-sickness, and the weary counting of the weeks and days before the time of returning home again.  But let me say to every reader who has it in his power directly or indirectly to do so, Oh, do what you can to make children happy! oh, seek to give that great enduring blessing of a happy youth!  Whatever after-life may prove, let there be something bright to look back upon in the horizon of their early time!  You may sour the human spirit forever, by cruelty and injustice in youth.  There is a past suffering which exalts and purifies; but this leaves only an evil result:  it darkens all the world, and all our views of it.  Let us try to make every little child happy.  The most selfish parent might try to please a little child, if it were only to see the fresh expression of unblunted feeling, and a liveliness of pleasurable emotion which in after-years we shall never know, I do not believe a great English barrister is so happy when he has the Great Seal committed to him as two little and rather ragged urchins whom I saw this very afternoon.  I was walking along a country-road, and overtook them.  They were about five years old.  I walked slower, and talked to them for a few minutes, and found that they were good boys, and went to school every day.  Then I produced two coins of the copper coinage of Britain:  one a large penny of ancient days, another a small penny of the present age.  “There is a penny for each of you,” I said, with some solemnity:  “one is large, you see, and the other small; but they are each worth exactly the same.  Go and get something good.”  I wish you had seen them go off!  It is a cheap and easy thing to make a little heart happy.  May this hand never write another essay, if it ever wilfully miss the chance of doing so!  It is all quite right in after-years to be careworn and sad.  We understand these matters ourselves.  Let others bear the burden which we ourselves bear, and which is doubtless good for us.  But the poor little things!  I can