is, to do it well.  Some people have the happy knack of talking to their own and to other people’s children so as always to interest and impress them.  But such happy people are few.  Most people talk at their children whenever they begin to talk to them, and thus, without knowing it, they nauseate their children with their conversation altogether.  To respect a little child, to stand in some awe of a little child, to choose your topics, your opportunities, your neighbourhood, your moods and his as well as all your words, and always to speak your sincerest, simplest, most straightforward and absolutely wisest is indispensable with a child.  Take your mannerisms, your condescensions, your affectations, your moralisings, and all your insincerities to your debauched equals, but bring your truest and your best to your child.  Unless you do so, you will be sure to lay yourself open to a look that will suddenly go through you, and that will swiftly convey to you that your child sees through you and despises you and your conversation too.  ‘You should not only have talked to your children of their danger,’ said Charity, ‘but you should have shown them their danger.’  Yes, Charity; but a man must himself see his own and his children’s danger too, before he can show it to them, as well as see it clearly at the time he is trying to show it to them.  And how many fathers, do you suppose, have the eyes to see such danger, and how then can they shew such danger to their children, of all people?  Once get fathers to see dangers or anything else aright, and then you will not need to tell them how they are to instruct and impress their children.  Nature herself will then tell them how to talk to their children, and when Nature teaches, all our children will immediately and unweariedly listen.

But, especially, said Charity, as your boys grew up—­I think you said that you had four boys and no girls?—­well, then, all the more, as they grew up, you should have taken occasion to talk to them about yourself.  Did your little boy never petition you for a story about yourself; and as he grew up did you never confide to him what you have never confided to his mother?  Something, as I was saying, that made you sad when you were a boy and a rising man, with a sadness your son can still see in you as you talk to him.  In conversations like that a boy finds out what a friend he has in his father, and his father from that day has his best friend in his son.  And then as Matthew grew up and began to out-grow his brothers and to form friendships out of doors, did you study to talk at the proper time to him, and on subjects on which you never venture to talk about to any other boy or man?  You men, Charity went on to say, live in a world of your own, and though we women are well out of it, yet we cannot be wholly ignorant that it is there.  And, we may well be wrong, but we cannot but think that fathers, if not mothers, might safely tell their men-children at least more than