The home may be but a better sort of prison, a house of bondage, or a mere meeting-house with short intervals between long services, or something equally wide of the mark; but then it is not a home. And we may think, as we strive to do our duty by our children in some ruthless way which robs their childhood of its purest joy, that they will rise up to call us blessed when they see the end of all our labor; but this is just what they will not do: the judgment day is sure to come when we stand or fall by what is written, or is not written, in the book of the life of our boys and girls. John Mill had this ruthless way with his boy, John Stuart Mill: he would make a great man of him. He made the man, but he lost the child because he let him have no due childhood; and there is no sadder strain to me in modern biography than the condemnation which is never quite uttered, but is always felt, in the story of this great man's life. It is the resentment of a soul robbed of its birthright to the joy which waits for us in the morning world. It is the same truth, again, in the life of Charles Dickens. The boy was robbed of his childhood, as it seems, through the general worthlessness of his father. He would fain have left this out, I trust, when he came to tell his own story, for those are still the noblest sons who will go backward, and cover their fathers' shame; but there was no way round it, and so with a sad sincerity the man has to tell the truth; and

there it stands, the instance of millions of unwritten lives of the same sunless quality which cast their shadows over old men's graves. The same sad truth is revealed again in the autobiography of Harriet Martineau. I say again, then, the axiom waits on a condition. I may hope for a verdict of "not guilty” from any quarter sooner than from these boys and girls of mine, if I filch from them this one gift. They are that other self with which I cannot tamper; a projection of my conscience which has gone quite beyond my control: so they may stand on the crest-line of forty years, and say in their hearts, "My father wronged me: he robbed me of what is best in the best days I shall ever see.”

But, if this is true of the shadow, it is true also of the light. No man need fear, or woman, that because their home is not ample, or the life of their children one of ease and plenty, they will not look back to the old place with infinite affection, if by all means in our power we let them have their childhood. We may have to face hard work and pinching times; but when we all face them together, let in all the sun there is anywhere about, and give it out of our hearts as well as take it out of the heavens, there can be but one issue, and that will be just the best we can long for.

The poor little fellow who came back to the work-house with his heart in his eyes had this one blessing, and no more, all the love there was in

one very simple-minded woman, all the brightness that love could compass, and the better half of a dry crust; but thirty years after it was all over, and the arms which had held him were dust, the rusty little grate became as the censer which held the fire in the old days on God's altars, and the gaunt, bare building as the temple on Zion. I think, indeed, this love for the old home is very often deepest and purest in those who have had the hardest times if we have fought through them in some bright, good way, and let the children have their childhood, it is not a sentiment then so much as the grain of our life. And we may think the children cannot understand it, or don't care: they can understand it, and they do care. The making of many a man has lain in the seeming failure of his poor striving father: it is not a matter of the mind, but of the instincts. We talk about chivalry: there never was a knight, since knighthood was heard of, who could answer to the cry of distress more bravely than that boy of yours who hears you tell sometimes how hard the world is on you, or who sits in his home with only "God and his mother." wealth and ease, if we are not wise, may act as nonconductors to isolate us from these fine currents of feeling and sympathy on which young souls grow quick and tremulous, while poverty and striving may deepen and intensify this everlasting love. There were homes in this world thirty or forty years

So

ago, bare of all things but this one secret: they are the dearest places on earth to-day to men and women who have every thing they want. There are such homes now, with hard times and hard toil for their lot, but the children have their childhood, and the best chance there is at their bit of joy; and in forty years from now these will rank many a home on the avenues of our great cities in their wealth of loving memories.

I note again that this is not a hard problem to solve, or a lottery in which we may win or lose by a turn of the wheel of fortune. It is one of the simplest things in the world; and it is this, that to the children we shall maintain a childlike heart and mind. The way to rob children of their childhood, and bring them to say some day, "There is no place like home" in a very sad and bitter sense, as I have said before, is to have our grown-up theories all laid out in line and square for the mind, the heart, and the soul, and then cut away at the little things as if they were so many plants in an old Dutch garden. They must go to bed at such a minute by the clock, and rise at such a minute; go to bed in the dark perhaps, and never mind the ghosts, because we don't mind them: they have skipped us, it may be, through some mystery of grace, so that we never did care about them any more than a cast-steel anvil does; but that boy of mine may care very much, because the ghosts of

forty centuries have got themselves tangled in his delicate little brain. Then they must bathe to suit us, and eat to suit us, work at their books to suit us, and play to suit us, sit just so at the table and by the fireside, and be seen but not heard when there is company, be so far along in their studies by such a time, and conform strictly to our idea of the studies, and so on to the end of the long, dreary chapter. We allow no room for the free play of their own primitive nature; no headway or leeway we have not settled beforehand. If we are freethinkers, they must be free-thinkers too; or, if we are Unitarians, we cannot imagine how they can be Catholics or Quakers. They must conform, in a word, to our ideas, though, in the marrow of our bones, we are nonconformists of the last distillation. Now, there never was a man in the world, worth his salt, who could look back to a childhood like this with a pure delight: the unfallen angel within him must bear witness against it forever. He may be so noble that a whisper of what he has lost shall never reach the world; he may hide it even from himself, and try to say it was all right: but for the world, if he is a man of sense and grace, he would not impose such a grown-up childhood on his own children. He knows what he has missed, and they must never know what he knows. So the open secret is this, I say, that we shall think more of the child than we do of the way, allow to