ion to sympathy and understanding and forbearance where the
spirit of comradeship dwells! And such comradeship is unaffected by
outward circumstance or by diversities of viewpoint or of educational
opportunity or of worldly possession.

Perhaps comradeship ought to be stressed for a moment, viewing a
tendency not quite uncommon to shelve parents, however politely, on
the part of children once they imagine themselves to have become
mature beings. Parental euthenasia can be practised or attempted in
many and subtle ways. Sir William Osler's forty years as a limit,--of
course the attribution is essentially fallacious,--fit into the notion
of those children who are for an easy and if possible painless
superannuation of lagging parents.

Needless to insist, comradeship means infinitely more than physical
proximity. If children but knew how at last when they are grown and
maturing, parents sometimes hunger for the companionship of son and
daughter, these might be ready to give up some of their comrades
whether first-rate or third-rate to satisfy the hunger of the parental
heart for companionship with the child. True, it is, that parents must
fit themselves throughout life for such comradeship, keeping their
hearts young and their minds unclosed. But frequently the failure is
due to the sheer selfishness of children, that selfishness which
considers not nor forbears, which lightly misunderstands and
unadvisedly rejects the parent as comrade on the way, though the
parent-heart hunger and ache. Children should not require exhortation
to the end that they remember parents are not feeders, clothiers,
stewards, landlords, boarding-house keepers, and that in exceptional
cases these continue to have the right to live after passing the
Methuselah frontier of fifty or sixty.

One is polite in exchange of courteous word even with one's hotel
clerk. Occasionally one confides in the mistress of a boarding-house.
If children but knew the pain some parents feel in that attitude of
children which reduces them in their own sight to the level of utterly
negligible rooming-house keepers for strangers, they could not demean
themselves as they do. This complaint has been voiced to me a number
of times within recent years, alike by people of cultivation and by
simple, untutored folk. In the former case, the filial silences are
generally due to disagreements and misunderstanding. There is such a
thing as the acceptance of hospitality on the part