But these faults in boy and girl alike are evidences of a “freshness” which wears off as the years roll on, as the green husk, when touched by the frost, falls away, leaving exposed the glossy brown shell enclosing the ripe, sweet kernel of the nut.

If this answer to your letter reads like a sermon, pardon one who is interested in young people, and who, well remembering when she was young herself, would fain hold out a helping hand to those who are stumbling on in the path she trod in years gone by.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THAT SPOILED CHILD.

I was the other day one of many passengers in a railroad train in which a small girl of four or five years of age was making a journey, accompanied by her mother and an aunt.  The child was beautiful, with a mass of golden curls.  Her velvet coat and the felt hat trimmed elaborately with ostrich plumes were faultless in their style; her behavior would compare unfavorably with the manners of a young Comanche Indian.  She insisted upon standing in the centre of the aisle, where she effectually blocked all passage, and, as the train was going rapidly, ran a great risk of being thrown violently against the seats.  When remonstrated with by her guardians, she slapped her aunt full in the face, pulled herself free from her mother’s restraining grasp, and, in a frenzy of rage, threw herself down right across the aisle.  There she lay for a full half hour.  When her mother would have raised her to her feet she uttered shriek after shriek, until her fellow-travelers’ ears rang.  After this triumph of young America over the rule and command of tyrannizing mamma, the innocent babe was allowed to remain prostrate in her chosen resting-place, while brakemen, conductor and passengers stepped gingerly over the recumbent form.  She varied the monotony of the situation by occasional wrathful kicks in the direction of her mother or at some would-be passer-by.

“It is best to let sleeping dogs lie,” sighed the mother of this prodigy to her sister.  “When she gets one of these attacks (and she has them quite often) I just leave her alone until she becomes ashamed of it.  She can’t bear to be crossed in anything.”

When I stepped from the train at my destination the humiliation for which her attendants longed was still a stranger to the willful child.

Trouble-fearing persons have a belief to the effect that it is, in the long run, easier to let a child have his own sweet way until he has attained the age of discretion,—­say at fourteen or fifteen years,—­when his innate sense of propriety will convince him of the error of his ways.  Such a theorist was a dear old gentleman who, many years ago, remonstrated with me upon the pains and time I spent in training my first born.  The children of this aged saint had been reared according to the old-fashioned notion, but when they had babies of their own they departed from it, and the rising generation had full and free sway.  Their grandparent, albeit frequently the victim of their pranks, loved them dearly.  He now assured me that—­