see and seize it, every means essential to the best and happiest use of evening.

I grant that it will require thought and time, and some perplexity and failure; and what one thing in life that we do does not involve these? And if you are willing, for the sake of some lesser success, to subject yourselves to these, if you contrive and toil and persevere for other things, why shall you complain, or halt, or refuse here? Your homes and your hearts will receive the exceeding great reward of your endeavor. Finding their pleasure and their joy and their profit in their homes, your children will be saved from depraved tastes and guilty pleasures; and when they come to leave you, the new home will not find them restless and craving for the higher flavoring of other scenes and pleasures. Of the many things warring against the home, open and disguised, nothing wars more successfully than the little pains taken by parents to make the evenings pleasant and profitable to the children.

But how are we to accomplish this? What are the means possible in every household?

Do we not mistake in not having some instruction at home, aside and separate from that of school, less formal, more genial, the sort of education for which the home is preeminently qualified, the drawing out of the child the impressions and opinions received

at school, which, as left by school, have always more or less that is crude about them? Do we not divorce the home and the school, when the home should in some direct way be made to bear upon the school, broadening and deepening that which it marks out ?* You expect impossibilities of your teachers and your children if you look for a thorough furnishing without your help. How much good it would do, how much pleasant occupation it would afford, how much valuable information would you receive, from ferreting out together with your children the hints or facts brought home from school, and with how much more zeal would they take hold of studies which they saw interested their homes! Collateral information, always valuable, oftentimes is of more importance than that which is direct. Nor is this less possible where the parents have had no early advantage. How many through interest in their children's studies, studying with or taught by them, have been enabled to supply the early deficiency, and through loving interest in their offspring, though late in life, have acquired, not knowledge merely, but a love for knowing! They are very few who, if they have the will, cannot find the way to a mutual intellectual benefit in the evening hours of the home.

The evening may still further be used for moral instruction, not the dull, prosy, set inculcation of

morals, but that incidental teaching for which every home furnishes sufficient material and opportunity. The fireside morality of which the more advanced so frequently speak, which they allude to as the influence of home, was of this nature,—the chance culling from every fact and incident, and the apt impressing at the moment of the best lesson that the moment taught, a thing done oftentimes in utter unconsciousness by the parent, the inevitable welling over of a spirit that was full of the purpose of blessing and sanctifying home. At home, I remember that this was constantly going on, and the little chance — let me rather say providential-seeds which fell at the evening fireside were the seeds full of the life that ripens for the harvest. I have no sense of the "too much" there, but of a constant, yet largely unconscious, evening influence, influence of silence sometimes, eloquent and effective as that of lip. It gave our home its grace and joy, and made its power.

I now come to touch the home in one of its most difficult relations. Next to religion I know no one subject more important, more easily to be mistaken in, more conscientiously to be decided upon, more resolutely to be met, more judiciously to be carried out, than the subject of the evening amusements of the home. It is a subject I cannot here go so thoroughly into as I should like, and I know very well that what

I

may say will shock the prejudices or the principles of some, while I shall fail of the sympathy of others, and perhaps peril my reputation with many. But I have something to say under this head which is not the birth of the moment, and may, therefore, perhaps be worthy a hearing.

The care of the parent should be not only not to repel, but to win. Without abating one whit of its authority, home should be a place every way genial to the growing spirits in it. Its orderings should change and keep pace with the development of the natures it enfolds. In the home, and from earliest existence, you detect the spirit of play. In the frolic laugh of the baby, in the merry and perpetual gambol of the child, in the restless noise of the boy, and the matronly propensity of the girl, you see how early and how large a part in every life is the element of play. In the earlier years the parent has little to do but to control it, to keep the rollicking exuberance within due limit.

But as the years roll, and the child grows, there comes the necessity, not merely for controlling, but directing. And here I think the first grave task of parentage begins. As home inevitably ceases to be the only law, and each young person becomes more and more law unto himself, some judgment and some tact will be requisite that this critical period be passed

Some homes,

through without alienating the child. disregarding a law that speaks as plainly in our natures as the law that was spoken from the mountain, shut off the still jubilant spirit from enjoyment which one portion of his being craves, as much and as rightly as another portion craves bread. Home, which was once play, is now restraint, and the boy or girl is assured of heinous wickedness lurking under pleasures in which he longs to participate as others do, in whom, for the life of him, he can detect nothing of the embryonic demon. Some homes make no effort, or but feebly set themselves against the torrent of young will that sets itself against every remonstrance. They offer no counteracting home inducements, and tamely yield to the pressure they should control, and you find the home deserted for a round of senseless outside frivolities, interrupted now and then by some sharp, sudden pulling up, as an awakened sense of parental responsibility for the moment demands. What real good that does, you may see by dropping in some time where pouting daughters and irritated sons tell of some coveted indulgence forbidden by parental freak. In other homes you find the parent spurring the child by precept and example, feeding its growing love for dress, for pleasure, for excitement, converting life into mere enjoyment, wasting the present, and insuring a future of utter