in, and she
always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which
negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is
right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She
does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare
not.

Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery,
they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount
Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically
too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present
power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open
oppression--a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the
subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him.
Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified
creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of
jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no
means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.

A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious
fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think
of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to
give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under
their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman
with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to
those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own
way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with
what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd
state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and
most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the
month, and never thoroughly known.

Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying
on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation--this
transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present
way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and
servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and
for nothing