nbons would
be so connected with the act of obedience as to associate very agreeable
ideas with it in the children's minds, and thus to make doing right appear
attractive to them on future occasions, while, at the same time, they would
not in any degree deprive the act itself of its spontaneous character, as
resulting from a sense of duty on their part, or produce the impression on
their minds that their remaining within the gate was of the nature of a
service rendered to their mother for hire, and afterwards duly paid for.

The lesson which we deduce from this illustration and the considerations
connected with it may be stated as follows:

_The General Principle_.

That the rewards conferred upon children with a view of connecting
pleasurable ideas and associations with good conduct should not take
the form of compensations stipulated for beforehand, and then conferred
according to agreement, as if they were of the nature of payment for
a service rendered, but should come as the natural expression of the
satisfaction and happiness felt by the mother in the good conduct of her
child--expressions as free and spontaneous on her part as the good conduct
was on the part of the child.

The mother who understands the full import of this principle, and whose
mind becomes fully possessed of it, will find it constantly coming into
practical use in a thousand ways. She has undertaken, for example, to teach
her little son to read. Of course learning to read is irksome to him. He
dislikes extremely to leave his play and come to take his lesson. Sometimes
a mother is inconsiderate enough to be pained at this. She is troubled to
find that her boy takes so little interest in so useful a work, and even,
perhaps, scolds him, and threatens him for not loving study. "If you don't
learn to read," she says to him, in a tone of irritation and displeasure,
"you will grow up a dunce, and every body will laugh at you, and you will
be ashamed to be seen."

_Children's Difficulties_.

But let her imagine that she herself was to be called away two or three
times a day, for half an hour, to study Chinese, with a very exacting
teacher, always more or less impatient and dissatisfied with her progress;
and yet the irksomeness and difficulty for the mother, in learning to
decipher Chinese, would be as nothing compared with that of the child in
learning to read. The only thing that could make the work even tolerable to
the mother would be a pretty