So much depends upon this great principle of obedience, that it is marvelous that parents ever disregard it.  I have known in my own experience three cases in which it was impossible to make a child take medicine, and death has followed in consequence.  One of the most painful recollections I have is of seeing a child six years old forced to swallow a febrifuge that was not unpalatable in itself.  The mother, father, and nurse held the struggling boy, while the physician pried open the set teeth and poured the liquid down his throat.  Under these circumstances it is probable that the remedy proved worse than the disease.

I have not space to do more than touch upon the great influence of early training on the future life.  All my days I have been thankful for the gentle but firm hand that, as a child, taught me moral courage, self-denial and submission.  The temptations of life have been more easily resisted, the trials more lightly borne, because of the years in which I was in training for the race set before me.  We do not want to enter our children on the course as unbroken, “soft” and wild colts, whose spirits must be crushed before they will submit to the work assigned them.  They may be young, yet strong; spirited, yet gentle; patient, yet resolute.

CHAPTER XXIV.

GETTING ALONG IN YEARS.

“Does your husband think a full beard becoming to him?” asked I of a young wife.

Her twenty-three-year-old lord, whose good-looking face had been adorned and made positively handsome by a sweeping brown moustache, had, since our last meeting, “raised” an uneven crop of reddish whiskers that shortened a face somewhat too round, and altogether vulgarized what had been refined.

“No, indeed!  He knows, as I do, that it disfigures him.  It is a business necessity to which he sacrificed vanity.  The appearance of maturity carries weight in the commercial world.  His beard adds ten years to his real age.”

Being in an audience collected to hear an eminent clergyman last summer, I heard an astonished gasp behind me, as the orator arose: 

“Why he has shaved off his beard!  How like a round oily man of God he looks!”

“True,” said another, “but fifteen years younger.  He is getting along in years, you see, and wants to hide the fact.”

The last speaker sat opposite to me at the hotel table that day, and in discussing the leader of the morning service, repeated the phrase that had jarred upon my ear.

“It is fatal to a clergyman’s popularity and to a woman’s hopes to be suspected of getting along in years.”

I told the story of my bearded youth and asked: 

“Where then is the safe ground?  When is it altogether reputable for one to declare his real age?”

“Oh, anywhere from thirty to forty-five!  Before and after that term life can hardly be said to be worth the living.”