In this matter of reading-of children’s reading—­we stand, just now, or halt just now, between two ways.  The parent, I believe, has decisively won back to the right one which good mothers never quite forsook.  There was an interval, lasting from the early years of the last century until midway in Queen Victoria’s reign and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought up on the assumption of natural vice.  They might adore father and mother, and yearn to be better friends with papa:  but there was the old Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the way, confound them!  I myself lived, with excellent grandparents, for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have never since had the smallest use for either.  Some of you may have read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called “The Fairchild Family,” in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily they may come to this if they go on as they have been going.  The authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one form of development, the development of Original Sin.  You stole a pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and ended on the gallows.  You were always Eric and it was always Little by Little with you....  Stay! memory preserves one gem from a Sunday school dialogue, one sharp-cut intaglio of childhood springing fully armed from the head of Satan: 

Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning?  A. I have been coursing of the squirrel.  Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord’s Day with idle sport?  A. By no means:  for I should tell you that I am an Atheist.

I forget what happened to that boy:  but doubtless it was, as it should have been, something drastic.

The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse, they become merely silly.  For an example in verse: 

  If Human Beings only knew
  What sorrows little birds go through,
     I think that even boys
  Would never think it sport or fun
  To stand and fire a frightful gun
     For nothing but the noise.

For another (instructional and quite a good memoria technica so far as it goes): 

     William and Mary came next to the throne: 
     When Mary died, there was William alone.

Now for a story of incident.—­It comes from the book “Reading Without Tears,” that made my small sister weep.  She did not weep over the story, because she did not claim to be an angel.

Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with the little cart?...  A lady drove the cart down to the beach.  She had six children with her.  Three little ones sat in the cart by her side.  Three bigger girls ran before the cart.  When they came to the beach the lady and the children got out.