nd how then can they shew such danger to
their children, of all people? Once get fathers to see dangers or
anything else aright, and then you will not need to tell them how they
are to instruct and impress their children. Nature herself will then
tell them how to talk to their children, and when Nature teaches, all our
children will immediately and unweariedly listen.

But, especially, said Charity, as your boys grew up--I think you said
that you had four boys and no girls?--well, then, all the more, as they
grew up, you should have taken occasion to talk to them about yourself.
Did your little boy never petition you for a story about yourself; and as
he grew up did you never confide to him what you have never confided to
his mother? Something, as I was saying, that made you sad when you were
a boy and a rising man, with a sadness your son can still see in you as
you talk to him. In conversations like that a boy finds out what a
friend he has in his father, and his father from that day has his best
friend in his son. And then as Matthew grew up and began to out-grow his
brothers and to form friendships out of doors, did you study to talk at
the proper time to him, and on subjects on which you never venture to
talk about to any other boy or man? You men, Charity went on to say,
live in a world of your own, and though we women are well out of it, yet
we cannot be wholly ignorant that it is there. And, we may well be
wrong, but we cannot but think that fathers, if not mothers, might safely
tell their men-children at least more than they do tell them of the sure
dangers that lie straight in their way, of the sorrow that men and women
bring on one another, and of what is the destruction of so many cities.
We may well be wrong, for we are only women, but I have told you what we
all think who keep this house and hear the reports and repentances of
pilgrims, both Piety and Prudence and I myself. And I, for one, largely
agree with the three women. It is easier said than done. But the simple
saying of it may perhaps lead some fathers and mothers to think about it,
and to ask whether or no it is desirable and advisable to do it, which of
them is to attempt it, on what occasion, and to what extent. Christian
by this time had the Slough of Despond with all its history and all that
it contained to tell his eldest son about; he had the wicket gate also
just above the slough, the hill Difficulty, the Interpreter's House, the