I do not wish to exhibit anything like a spirit of egotism, and I assure you that I write with a gratified feeling that is a very wide remove from that selfish sentiment, when I tell you that I have received from very many parents, in different parts of the country, letters containing their “warm and grateful thanks” for the endeavor which I made, in a recent number of your magazine, to create more confidence in childhood and youth; to awaken, along with a “sense of duty”—­that too frequent excuse for domestic tyranny—­a feeling of generous forbearance for the trivial, venial faults of those whose hearts are just and tender, and whom “kindness wins when cruelty would repel.”  You must let me go on in my own way, and I will try to illustrate the truth and justice of my position.

I must go back to my very earliest schooldays.  I doubt if I was more than five years old, a little boy in the country, when I was sent, with my twin-brother, to a summer “district school.”  It was kept by a “school-ma’am,” a pleasant young woman of some twenty years of age.  She was positively my first love.  I am afraid I was an awkward scholar at first; but the enticing manner in which Mary ——­ (I grieve that only the faint sound of her unsyllabled name comes to me now from “the dark backward and abysm of Time”) coaxed me through the alphabet and the words of one syllable; encouraged me to encounter those of two (the first of which I remember to this day, whenever the baker’s bill for my children’s daily bread is presented for audit); stimulated me to attack those of three; until, at the last, I was enabled to surmount that tallest of orthoepical combinations, “Mi-chi-li-mack-i-nack”, without a particle of fear; the enticing manner, I say, in which Mary ——­ accomplished all this, won my heart.  She would stoop over and kiss me, on my low seat, when I was successful, and very pleasant were her “good words” to my ear.  Bless your heart!  I remember at this moment the feeling of her soft brown curls upon my cheek; and I would give almost anything now to see the first “certificate” of good conduct which I brought home, in her handwriting, to my mother, and which was kept for years among fans, bits of dried orange-peel, and sprigs of withered “caraway,” in a corner of the bureau-"draw.”  All this came very vividly to me some time ago, when my own little boy brought home his first “school-ticket.”  He is not called, however—­and I rejoice that he is not—­to remember dear companions, who “bewept to the grave did go, with true-love showers.”

  “Oh, my mother! oh, my childhood! 
    Oh, my brother, now no more! 
  Oh, the years that push me onward,
    Farther from that distant shore!”