Then a great trouble, always pressing heavily on many a little mind, is that it is overtasked with lessons.  You still see here and there idiotic parents striving to make infant phenomena of their children, and recording with much pride how their children could read and write at an unnaturally early age.  Such parents are fools:  not necessarily malicious fools, but fools beyond question.  The great use to which the first six or seven years of life should be given is the laying the foundation of a healthful constitution in body and mind; and the instilling of those first principles of duty and religion which do not need to be taught out of any books.  Even if you do not permanently injure the young brain and mind by prematurely overtasking them,—­even if you do not permanently blight the bodily health and break the mind’s cheerful spring, you gain nothing.  Your child at fourteen years old is not a bit farther advanced in his education than a child who began his years after him; and the entire result of your stupid driving has been to overcloud some days which should have been among the happiest of his life.  It is a woful sight to me to see the little forehead corrugated with mental effort, though the effort be to do no more than master the multiplication table:  it was a sad story I lately heard of a little boy repeating his Latin lesson over and over again in the delirium of the fever of which he died, and saying piteously that indeed he could not do it better.  I don’t like to see a little face looking unnaturally anxious and earnest about a horrible task of spelling; and even when children pass that stage, and grow up into school-boys who can read Thucydides and write Greek iambics, it is not wise in parents to stimulate a clever boy’s anxiety to hold the first place in his class.  That anxiety is strong enough already; it needs rather to be repressed.  It is bad enough even at college to work on late into the night; but at school it ought not to be suffered for one moment.  If a lad takes his place in his class every day in a state of nervous tremor, he may be in the way to get his gold medal, indeed; but he is in the way to shatter his constitution for life.

We all know, of course, that children are subjected to worse things than these.  I think of little things early set to hard work, to add a little to their parents’ scanty store.  Yet, if it be only work, they bear it cheerfully.  This afternoon, I was walking through a certain quiet street, when I saw a little child standing with a basket at a door.  The little man looked at various passers-by; and I am happy to say, that, when he saw me, he asked me to ring the door-bell for him:  for, though he had been sent with that basket, which was not a light one, he could not reach up to the bell.  I asked him how old he was.  “Five years past,” said the child, quite cheerfully and independently.  “God help you, poor little man!” I thought; “the doom of toil has fallen early upon you!”