very
well-behaved children will go in an instant; and I have known a child
who has been romping in a complete gale of innocent roguery to burst
into tears, if not duly called to the table in time to hear grace said,
and, after clucking with the hens, crying as if heart-broken over a dead
bird. I went last spring with a friend to witness a great religious
festival at a distinguished ecclesiastical community,--the festival of
Corpus Christi, with its gorgeous procession. We were admitted through
the private entrance, and saw the altar-boys in the entry waiting in
caps and robes to lead off the pageant. They were in high spirits, and
pulling and nudging each other like boys of the usual mould. Soon they
appeared in church with folded hands, chanting the "Lauda Sion" before
the uplifted Host as demurely as if they had walked down from the
pictures of seraphs on the walls. "What little hypocrites!" the
Philistines at once cry; "what a trick, thus to affect to be pious,
after those pranks of mischief!" I say, No such thing; and although not
personally given to Corpus-Christi ceremonials as a devotee, I interpret
such transitions as I would interpret the conduct of my own children who
came from a frolic on the lawn or a game of croquet to a Scripture
lesson or the household worship. Let us be true to human nature, and
give every genuine faculty and impulse fair play. Our American
literature can afford to be more generous to children than it has been,
and let them gambol on the play-ground none the less from keeping the
library open for grave reading, and the chapel not closed in ghostly
gloom.

Our books for children must be truthful as well as interesting; and we
are quite strong in the belief that they should be true to all our just
American ideas. It cannot be expected, indeed, that our story-tellers,
poets, and biographers for the young will desert their pleasant arts,
and inflict upon their readers prosy essays upon American law, society,
reform, and progress. What we should expect and demand is, that our
children should be brought up to regard American principles as matters
of course; and their books should take these principles for granted, and
illustrate them with all possible interest and power. They should be
trained in the belief that here the opportunities for education, labor,
enterprise, freedom, influence, and prosperity are to be thrown open to
all; and the highest encouragement should be given to every one to