dead lame.  You do not trust your thorough-bred colt, hitherto unhandled, to any one who is not understood to have a thorough knowledge of the characteristics and education of horses.  But in numberless instances, even in the better classes of society, a thing which needs to be guarded against a thousand wrong tendencies, and trained up to a thousand right things from which it is ready to shrink, the most sensitive and complicated thing in nature, the human soul, is left to have its character formed by hands as hopelessly unfit for the task as the Lord Chancellor is to prepare the winner of the next St. Leger.  You find parents and guardians of children systematically following a course of treatment calculated to bring out the very worst tendencies of mind and heart that are latent in the little things given to their care.  If a young horse has a tendency to shy, how carefully the trainer seeks to win him away from the habit.  But if a poor little boy has a hasty temper, you may find his mother taking the greatest pains to irritate that temper.  If the little fellow have some physical or mental defect, you have seen parents who never miss an opportunity of throwing it in the boy’s face; parents who seem to exult in the thought that they know the place where a touch will always cause to wince,—­the sensitive, unprotected point where the dart of malignity will never fail to get home.  If a child has said or done some wrong or foolish thing, you will find parents who are constantly raking up the remembrance of it, for the pure pleasure of giving pain.  Even so would a kindly man, who knows that his horse has just come down and cut himself, take pains whenever he came to a bit of road freshly macadamized to bring down the poor horse on the sharp stones, again with his bleeding knees.  And even where you do not find positive malignity in those entrusted with the training of human minds, you find hopeless incornpetcncy exhibited in many other ways; outrageous silliness and vanity, want of honesty, and utter want of sense.  I say it deliberately, instead of wondering that most minds are such screws, I wonder with indescribable surprise that they are not a thousand times worse.  For they are like trees pruned and trained into ugliness and barrenness.  They are like horses carefully tutored to shy, kick, rear, and bite.  It says something hopeful as to what may yet be made of human beings, that most of them are no worse than they are.  Some parents, fancying too that they are educating their children on Christian principles, educate them in such fashion that Ihe only wonder is that the children do not end at the gallows.