ourselves with being surprised that there should exist these family dissimilarities. We say, We say, "Who would suppose they were brother and sister?" as if ever since Cain killed Abel there had not been in human homes every conceivable range and gradation of character; as if anybody ever did find similarity the law of the family.

This dissimilarity is one of the most perplexing things about a family, requiring patience, care, impartiality; and if parents would prevent the making of a wretched mistake and failure, they should aim to acquire a thorough knowledge of the composition of their own families, a study taxing mind and heart severely, and the whole family government and life should be based upon what they discover. Dealing with children, always a difficult matter, should not be left to the hazard of impulse or caprice, but be guided by knowledge. You feel that certain households go on much more satisfactorily than others. They are not the homes of great external advantage; you would not mark the parents as superior, or the children as unlike all children; but there is a charm about the family that you may not understand, and puzzle yourself to account for. There is no less of exuberant spirit, no less of jocund mirth, no less of ease and naturalness, nothing to give that painful feeling of the unnatural curb and drill which breaks some families

into premature proprieties, but a freedom which never infringes, a confidence that is never abused, a judgment that seems never to err, control that is not a curb, and a harmony of which such discordant material seems to others incapable. If you could get at the secret of this, you would probably find that the parents had made it a point to know their children, had not been content to know their countenances and voices and manners, and a few outside and obvious peculiarities, but had studied them in each step of their progress, had adapted their intercourse with each to each, had taught their children as they grew to recognize and respect each other's individuality, and so had gradually constructed a genuine family, that truest and most needed of human institutions. I do not believe there is any accident about a good home, any more than there is any accident about a fine tree. Both are the products of well-considered opposites brought into harmony by a superintending wisdom.

I do not think this knowledge is often sought by the parent. I do not think he sets himself to find out what is going on within the heart and mind of his child. Necessity sometimes forces it upon him, accident sometimes reveals it, or a shrewd guess may detect some things; but the deliberate searching into the peculiarities of his children, and the ordering his

and their intercourse by what he discovers, is the rare work of the home-head. How much real conversation goes on in our homes? How much questioning of what is learned at school, from books, from others? how much of what each one learns from himself? how much interchange of thought and feeling? Here is a child's mind, a germ of wisdom, wonder, and power, compassed about by infinite mysteries, of which it is on all hands seeking the solution. The child mind does not stand out in God's world as the adult mind does, callous, or self-satisfied, or sceptical, but in the spirit of childhood, and with more reverence than we know, asks that it may believe. It turns to us, who are its natural teachers, whom it looks up to with the same love and reverence it looks on all things. What do we? Listen, explain, draw out, lead on? or do we rebuff, and send the opening spirit shuddering back within itself, and teach it in its early hours to keep close-locked all its inner wants? Do we dive, as we might, into the mysterious depths of the childnature, or, taking its wings, not clogged as ours, soar upward toward those other mysteries which wait and watch for our coming? A little spirit peering all aglow with wonder in at the doorway of knowledge, do we lift its feet over the threshold, and encourage to pursue its way from room to room, touching and tasting and appropriating of the heaped-up treasure

it

stored therein? Is it not rather that the child forces its way, despite the neglect, the indifference, the repulse of parents, who know nothing less than what it knows, or stupidly wonder how it got such things? Home talk! it is the talk of the elders, of sermons, of business, of fashions, of neighbors; it is superficial, if not injurious; or it is too high, and they cannot attain unto it. It gives nothing to the aspiration or the want of childhood, while the set talk with children is hard and forced, a talking at them, rather than a talking with them,—a forcing your convictions, rather than drawing out theirs. Sometimes it seems as if the staple of home intercourse were a tirade against noise, carelessness, and the thousand vexatious inadvertencies of child-life, and as if that would be all the memory of home intercourse the child would have to carry with it into the world.

I remember to have marked in a book I read some years ago the following passage: "It had grown to be an unhappy instinct with me to get as much as possible out of my father's way." Unhappy indeed; and what a strange statement it would seem, did we not know that this grows to be the instinct of too many children. How often do you see that the mother is the exclusive friend, companion, and confidante, while the father is a sort of bugbear, who is not to be approached or disturbed, whose presence is

a restraint, whose departure a relief. This is not the mother's doing, or the child's. The fault lies with the father. His child is a plaything to him. As soon as he tires of his toy, it ceases to give him that sort of pleasure; as soon as it grows disagreeable, he begins to chafe, and hands it over to the mother. The repulse is understood, and works its natural result. The child shuns the father, makes the mother confidante, learns to persuade her, and gets her to persuade the father, and each time he gains his end the separation is more complete. This is not nature's doing. Nature draws the child, undoubtedly, toward the mother, but she does not draw it from the father. It looks to her, goes to her for some things; but where there is a true relationship, it soon comprehends that there are wants she cannot meet. more confiding ways, her more genial sympathies, nay, let us go back to the great truth at once, that mystic tie which links from the first and forever the child-life and the mother-life, give her the place the father never gets; but as childhood passes, and new experiences press, and life is out of doors, and school and other children make their impression, then more and more the boy, at least, feels the need of the father. Fatal is the mistake that father makes who in these years separates himself more and more from his children, and fearfully shall it be visited upon him in the

Her