What looks like natural antipathy between big sisters and little brothers is but one of several reasons why home is so often less like home to the boys than to the rest of the family.

I have in my mind’s eye a distinct picture of the quarters allotted to a promising college-lad in the mansion of a wealthy father, and which I saw by accident.  Each of the three accomplished sisters had her own bed-chamber, fitted up according to her taste.  A spacious sitting-room on the second floor, with windows on the sunny front and at the side, was common to the trio.  There were flowers, workstands, desks, easels, bookshelves, lounging and sewing chairs, pictures selected by each; portieres in the doorways and costly rugs upon the polished floor.  Up two flights of stairs, on the same floor with the servants, the brother was domiciled in a low-browed, sunless back-room, overlooking kitchen-yards and roofs.  A dingy ingrain carpet was worn thin in numerous places; no two pieces of furniture were even remotely related to one another in style or age.  The wall-paper hung here and there in strips; the windows were dim with dirt; dust lay thickly in every corner; a counterpane of dubious complexion had a dark, wide-spreading stain in the centre.

It is true, I admit, that the place reeked with stale cigar smoke, and that the infirm table propped for security against the wall, groaned under a collection of juvenile “properties,” the heterogeneity of which, defies my pen and memory.  But, bestow a wild boy in such lodgings as he might find in a low tavern, and he will treat them accordingly.  He is more observant than his mother imagines, and more sensitive than his sisters would believe.  Too proud to betray the sense of humiliation engendered by appointments unsuited to his station and education, he proceeds to be “comfortable” and “jolly” in his own way.

To return to our own Boy—­who, my heart misgives me, lifted up his voice and wept sore last night upon discovering that the hard-won beans and scarlet-speckled apples were left behind—­his loving mother has hung his nursery walls with good engravings and artistically-colored pictures, in the conviction that a child’s taste for art is formed early and for long.  Heaven grant that she may keep true to this principle in all matters pertaining to his upbringing, and in judicious dependence upon the influence of external impressions upon the immature mind of her offspring!

Is our bigger boy, then, so rooted and grounded in right tastes and right feeling as to be proof against the atmosphere of the worst-located and worst-furnished room covered by his father’s roof?  How far will the mother’s assertion that he is the apple of her eye and dearest earthly possession go, when balanced against the object-lesson of quarters which are the household hospital of incurables, in the line of beds, tables, stools and candlesticks?  If his sister’s room is adorned with exquisite etchings and choice paintings, while his is the refuge for chromos that have had their day—­will he not draw his own inferences?  If his mother never climbs to the sky-parlor to see that the careless housemaid does her duty in sweeping, dusting and picking-up, does not he divine why his chamber is systematically neglected?