The same over legislation often obtains in the school-room, springing doubtless from a desire on the part of the teacher to preserve a more perfect order among his pupils.  Hence the number and minuteness of his rules; and in his endeavor to reduce them to practice, and make clock-work of the internal machinery, he quite likely defeats the very object he has in view.  A school-teacher who pretends to notice every aberration from order and propriety is quite likely to have his hands full, and just so with parents.  Some children cannot keep still.  Their nervous temperament does not admit of it.  I once heard an elderly gentleman say, that when riding in a coach, he was so confined that he felt as if he should die because he could not change his position.  Oh! if he could have stirred but an inch!  Children often feel just so.  And it is bad policy to require them to sit as so many little immoveable statues.  “There, sit in just that spot, and don’t you move an inch till I bid you.”  Who has not heard a parent give forth such a mandate?  And a school-master, too, to some little urchin, who tries to obey, but from that moment begins to squirm, and turn, and hitch, and chiefly because his nervous system is all deranged by the very duty imposed upon him.  And, besides, what if Tommy, in the exuberance of his feelings, while sitting on the bench, does stick out his toe a little beyond the prescribed line.  Or suppose Jimmy crowds up to him a little too closely, and feeling that he can’t breathe as freely as he wishes, gives him a hunch; or suppose Betty, during a temporary fit of fretfulness, induced by long setting in one posture, or overcome with the heat of a midsummer afternoon, or the sweltering temperature of a room where an old-fashioned box stove has been converted into a furnace; suppose Betty gives her seat-mate a sly pinch to make her move to a more tolerable distance, shall the teacher utter his rebuke in tones which might possibly be appropriate if a murder was about being committed?  I have known a schoolmaster “fire up” like a steam-engine, and puff and whiz at the occurrence of some such peccadilloes, and the consequence was that the whole school was soon at a stand-still as to study, and the askance looks and suppressed titter of the little flock told you that the teacher had made no capital that time.  I have seen essentially the same thing in parents.

Now, I am not exactly justifying such conduct in children.  But such offences will exist, despite of all the wisdom, authority, and sternness in the wide world.  My position is, that these minor matters must sometimes be left.  They had better not always be seen, or if seen, not be noticed.  I think those who have the care of children may take a lesson from a slut and her pups, or a cat and her kittens.  Who has not seen the puppy or the kitten taking some license with their dams?—­biting as puppies and kittens bite at play?  Well, and what sort of treatment do they sometimes get from the older folks?