the creature obeys in spite of himself.  This same principle applies to children.  If you cannot control yourself the children know it, and you may as well give up all idea of curbing them.  The nervous twitching at the bit and the attempt to govern them by reason of your superior age or knowledge aggravates the evil.  It is a mistake to forget that children are human beings, with sensitive feelings like our own, only not as hardened and used to the ways of this unsympathetic world as we are.  Their government must have love at its beginning, continuing and ending if it would be successful.

You may as well recognize the fact first as last that you are laboring under a disadvantage in that the hyphenized “step” must precede your name of mother.  This being the case, you have need to add to your love patience, and to that tact, and to that pity.  If the children exasperate you, do not let them guess it.  Keep a rigid guard upon the harsh tongue.  If the demon of Impatience tempts you to utter the quick “Stop that noise!” or “Do be quiet!”—­seal your lips as surely as if life and death depended upon your silence.  Your most severe critics will not be slow in discovering that you love them too much to “scold” or be cross.  You make tremendous strides towards their love when they cannot point to a single unjust act that you commit against them.

It may be well in passing to remind you that boys and girls remember an injustice for many years.  They themselves are often fair enough to acknowledge after the first flush of anger is over, that they merited a punishment which they have received.  As a rule, until they are old men and women, they do not forget the undeserved blow, the unprovoked sarcasm.  We many times receive patiently, as grown men and women, reminders that we are doing wrong, but we find it hard to pardon the person who accuses us falsely.

The most powerful auxiliary love can have in accomplishing its end is tact.  Some people have more than others, but at all times it may be cultivated.  Perhaps the best rule by which to learn it is the old one of “Put yourself in his place.”  Reverse the positions as in Anstey’s “Vice Versa,” and imagine yourself a hot-headed, sore-hearted, prejudiced child, with a step-mother against whom your mind has been poisoned by those older and presumably wiser than yourself.  How would you receive this or that correction?  Acquire the habit of thus putting the matter before your mind’s eye, and you will soon find that tactful patience becomes second nature.

If you can possibly avoid it, do not correct the children in the presence of other people, or complain to their father of them.  If he once reproves them with the prefix, “Your mother tells me that you have done so-and-so,” he has laid the foundations of a distrust difficult to remove.  Rather let them domineer over you than try to manage them by appealing to their father, and, thus making them feel sure that you are attempting to prejudice him against them.  They are naturally suspicious, and it will take very little to make them positively certain that you are their natural enemy.