“While they are regular little barbarians, my dear, still they have all that freedom and wild liberty which should accompany childhood.  They eat when and what they please, go to bed when they feel like it, rise early or late as the whim seizes them, and know no prescribed rules for diet and deportment.  But they come of good stock and will turn out all right.”

They did come of good, honest parents, and this may have been what saved their moral, while their physical being has suffered from the course pursued during their infancy and early youth.  There were six children; now there are four.  One died when a mere baby from cold contracted from running about the house in winter weather in her bare feet.  She was so fond of doing this that her mother could not bear to put shoes and stockings on the dear little tot.  The other, a sweet, affectionate boy, suffered at regular intervals during the fifteen years of his life from acute indigestion.  Directly after one of these attacks, he, as was his habit, followed the cravings of an undisciplined appetite, and attended, late at night, a pea-nut-and-candy supper, almost immediately after which he was taken violently ill and died in three days.  The four remaining children do not, all told, possess enough constitution to make one strong man.  They are all delicate and constant sufferers.

In this case judicious care might have averted the above-mentioned evils.  Would the game have been worth the candle?

This is a question which parents cannot afford to disregard.  It is expedient for them to consider seriously whether or not the stock on both sides of the family, of which their children come, is so good as to warrant neglect or to justify over-indulgence.

Our mother-tongue does not offer us a phrase by which we may express what we mean by l’enfant terrible.  But our father-land produces many living examples which may serve as translations of the French words.  Such an one was the small boy who, while eagerly devouring grapes, threw the skins, one after another, into the lap of my new light silk gown.  His mother entered a smilingly gentle protest in the form of—­

“Oh, Frankie dear! do you think it is pretty to do that?” to which he paid as much attention as to my look of distress.  The reader who believes in “lending a hand” in righting the minor evils of society must have more temerity and a larger share of what the boy of the period denominates “nerve” than I possess, if she interferes with a child while in the presence of the mother.  It is as unsafe as the proverbial act of inserting the digits between the bark and the tree.  It is, moreover, a liberty which I should never permit the dearest friend to take.  In fact, so strong is my feeling on this subject, that I should have allowed “Frankie dear” to make a fruit-plate and finger-bowl of the shimmering folds of my gown rather than utter a feeble objection before his doting mamma.