To this physical resemblance there soon succeeds a moral likeness, charming in quite another way.  You are moved to tears when you recognize the first efforts of this little intelligence to grasp your ideas.  Without check or examination it accepts and feeds on them.  By degrees the child shares your tastes, your habits, your ways.  He assumes a deep voice to be like papa, asks for your braces, sighs before your boots, and sits down with admiration on your hat.  He protects his mamma when he goes out with her, and scolds the dog, although he is very much afraid of him; all to be like papa.  Have you caught him at meals with his large observant eyes fixed on you, studying your face with open mouth and spoon in hand, and imitating his model with an expression of astonishment and respect.  Listen to his long gossips, wandering as his little brain; does he not say: 

“When I am big like papa I shall have a moustache and a stick like him, and I shall not be afraid in the dark, because it is silly to be afraid in the dark when you are big, and I shall say ‘damn it,’ for I shall then be grown up.”

“Baby, what did you say, sir?”

“I said just as papa does.”

What would you?  He is a faithful mirror.  You are for him an ideal, a model, the type of all that is great and strong, handsome and intelligent.

Often he makes mistakes, the little dear, but his error is all the more delicious in its sincerity, and you feel all the more unworthy of such frank admiration.  You console yourself for your own imperfections in reflecting that he is not conscious of them.

The defects of children are almost always harrowed from their father; they are the consequences of a too literal copy.  Provide, then, against them.  Yes, no doubt, but I ask you what strength of mind is not needed by a poor man to undeceive his baby, to destroy, with a word, his innocent confidence, by saying to him:  “My child, I am not perfect, and I have faults to be avoided?”

This species of devotion on the part of the baby for his father reminds me of the charming remark of one of my little friends.  Crossing the road, the little fellow caught sight of a policeman.  He examined him with respect, and then turning to me, after a moment’s reflection, said, with an air of conviction:  “Papa is stronger than all the policemen, isn’t he?”

If I had answered “No,” our intimacy would have been broken off short.

Was it not charming?  One can truly say, “Like baby, like papa.”  Our life is the threshold of his.  It is with our eyes that he has first seen.

Profit, young fathers, by the first moments of candor on the part of your dear baby, seek to enter his heart when this little heart opens, and establish yourself in it so thoroughly, that at the moment when the child is able to judge you, he will love you too well to be severe or to cease loving.  Win his, affection, it is worth the trouble.