We fathers and mothers have no right to make our children old before their time.  Each age has its own trials, which are as great as any one person should bear.  We know that the troubles that come to our babies are only baby troubles, but they are as large to them as our griefs are to us.  A promised drive, which does not “materialize,” proves as great a disappointment to your tiny girl as the unfulfilled promise of a week in the country would to you, her sensible mother.  Of course our children must learn to bear their trials.  My plea is that they may not be forced to bear our anxieties also.  If a thing is an annoyance to you, it will be an agony to your little child, who has not a tenth of your experience, philosophy and knowledge of life.

There is something cowardly and weak in the man or woman who has so little self-control that he or she must press a child’s tender shoulders into service in bearing burdens.  Teach your children to be careful, teach them prudence and economy, but let them be taught as children.

The forcing of a child’s sympathies sometimes produces a hardening effect, as in the case of a small boy whose mother was one of the sickly-sentimental sort.  She had drawn too often upon her child’s sensibilities.

“Charlie,” she said, plaintively, to her youngest boy, “what would you do if poor mamma were to get very sick?”

“Send for the doctor.”

“But, Charlie, suppose poor, dear mamma should die!  Then, what would you do?”

“I’d go to the funeral!” was the cheerful response.

To my mind this mother had the son ordained for her from the beginning of the world.

Many boys are all love and sympathy for their mothers.  Mamma appeals to all that is tender and chivalrous in the nature of the man that is to be.  The maternal tenderness ought to be too strong to impose upon this sacred feeling.

Perhaps one of the prettiest of Bunner’s “Airs from Arcady” is that entitled, “In School Hours,” in which he thus describes the woe of the thirteen-year-old girl when she receives the cruel letter from the boy of her admiration.  The poet tells us this sorrow “were tragic at thirty,” and asks, “Why is it trivial at thirteen!”

   “Trivial! what shall eclipse
     The pain of our childish woes? 
   The rose-bud pales its lips
     When a very small zephyr blows. 
   You smile, O Dian bland,
     If Endymion’s glance is cold: 
   But Despair seems close at hand
     To that hapless thirteen-year old!”

CHAPTER XXI.

OUR YOUNG PERSON.

I well remember a girl’s tearful appeal to me when she was stigmatized and reproved for her “giddy youth!” “It is not my fault that I was born young!  And I am not responsible for the fact that I entered upon existence seventeen, instead of seventy, years ago.  At all events, it was not a sin even if I was guilty of such a folly!”