you are weary, or busy; but you cannot find it in your heart to cast a shadow of disappointment on the eager little faces that come and ask you.  You have to stop writing many a time, in the middle of a sentence, to open your study door at the request of a little voice outside; and to admit a little visitor who can give no more definite reason for her visit than that she has come to see you, and tell you she has been a good girl.  And all this is well for you It breaks in hour by hour upon your native selfishness.  And it cosfs you not the slightest effort to give up your own wish to that of your child.  Even if to middle age you retain the innocent taste for sweetmeats, would you not have infinitely greater pleasure in seeing your little boy or girl eating up the contents of your parcel, than in eating them yourself?  It is to me a thoroughly disgusting sight to see, as we sometimes do, the wife and children of a family kept in constant terror of the selfish bashaw at the head of the house, and ever on the watch to yield in every petty matter to his whims and fancies.  Sometimes, where he is a hard-wrought and anxious man, whose hard work earns his children’s bread, and whose life is their sole stay, it is needful that he should be deferred to in many things, lest the overtasked brain and overstrained nervous system should break down or grow unequal to their task.  But I am not thinking of such cases.  I mean cases in which the head of the family is a great fat, bullying, selfish scoundrel; who devours sullenly the choice dishes at dinner, and walks into all the fruit at dessert, while his wife looks on in silence, and the awe-stricken children dare not hint that they would like a little of what the brutal hound is devouring.  I mean cases in which the contemptible dog is extremely well dressed, while his wife and children’s attire is thin and bare; in which he liberally tosses about his money in the billiard-room, and goes off in autumn for a tour on the Continent by himself, leaving them to the joyless routine of their unvaried life.  It is sad to see the sudden hush that falls upon the little things when he enters the house; how their sports are cut short, and they try to steal away from the room.  Would that I were the Emperor of Russia, and such a man my subject!  Should not he taste the knout?  Should not I make him howl?  That would be his suitable punishment:  for he will never feel what worthier mortals would regard as the heavier penalty by far, the utter absence of confidence or real affection between him and his children when they grow up.  He will not mind that there never was a day when the toddling creatures set up a shout of delight at his entrance, and rushed at him and scaled him and searched in his pockets, and pulled him about; nor that the day will never come when, growing into men and women, they will come to him for sympathy and guidance in their little trials and perplexities.  Oh, woful to think that there are parents, held in general estimation too, to whom their children would no more think of going for kindly sympathy, than they would think of going to Nova Zembla for warmth!