d rare occasions, it will be sure to sit awkwardly upon you.
If you are not well behaved in your own family circle, you will hardly
be truly so anywhere, however strictly you may conform to the
observances of good breeding, when in society. The true gentleman or
lady is a gentleman or lady at all times and in all places--at home as
well as abroad--in the field, or workshop, or in the kitchen, as well
as in the parlor. A snob is--a _snob_ always and everywhere.

If you see a man behave in a rude and uncivil manner to his father or
mother, his brothers or sisters, his wife or children; or fail to
exercise the common courtesies of life at his own table and around his
own fireside, you may at once set him down as a boor, whatever
_pretensions_ he may make to gentility.

Dc not fall into the absurd error of supposing that you may do as you
please at home--that is, unless you please to behave in a perfectly
gentlemanly or ladylike manner. The same rights exist there as
elsewhere, and the same duties grow out of them, while the natural
respect and affection which should be felt by each member of the
family for all the other members, add infinitely to their sacredness.
Let your good manners, then, begin at home.

II.--PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

American children (we are sorry to be obliged to say it) are not, as a
general rule, well behaved. They are rude and disrespectful, if not
disobedient. They inspire terror rather than love in the breasts of
strangers and all persons who seek quiet and like order. In our
drawing-rooms, on board our steamers, in our railway cars and stage
coaches, they usually contrive to make themselves generally and
particularly disagreeable by their familiarity, forwardness, and
pertness. "Young America" can not brook restraint, has no conception
of superiority, and reverences nothing. His ideas of equality admit
neither limitation nor qualification. He is born with a full
comprehension of his own individual rights, but is slow in learning
his social duties. Through whose fault comes this state of things?
American boys and girls have naturally as much good sense and
good-nature as those of any other nation, and, when well trained, no
children are more courteous and agreeable. The fault lies in their
education. In the days of our grandfathers, children were taught
manners at school--a rather rude, backwoods sort of manners, it is
true, but better than the no manners at all of the present day. We
must