ot one is worth a damn." I fear me that every father with
sons grown to manhood has at some time voiced the same sentiment,
curtailed, possibly, only as to numbers, and softened by another
expletive, which does not mitigate the anguish of his cry, as he sees the
dreams he had for his baby boys fade away into a mist of agonizing tears.

And is all this worry the penalty that Nature exacts for dreaming dreams
that can not in their very nature come true? Jean Jacques Rousseau, who
wrote so beautifully on child-study, avoided the risk of failure by
putting his children into an asylum; several "Communities" since have set
apart certain women to be mothers to all, and bring up and care for the
young, and strangely, with no apparent loss to the children; and Bellamy
prophesies a day when the worries of parenthood will all be transferred to
a "committee."

But the worry is futile and senseless, being born often of a blindness
that will not wait. Man has not only "Seven Ages," but many more, and he
must pass through this one before the next arrives. The Commodore
certainly possessed what is called horse-sense, and if his conceptions of
character had been clearer, he might have realized that in more ways than
one the abilities of his sons were going to be greater than his own. His
eldest son was, nevertheless, banished to a Long Island farm on a pension,
"because he could not be trusted to do business." The same son once
modestly asked the Commodore if he would allow him to have the compost
that had been for a year accumulating outside the Fifth Avenue barns.
"Just one load, and no more," said pater. William thereupon took twenty
teams and as many men, and transferred the entire pile to a barge moored
in the river. It was a barge-load. And when pater saw what had been done,
he said, "The boy is not so big a fool as I thought." The boy was
forty-five ere death put him in possession of the gold that the father no
longer had use for, there being no pockets in a shroud, and he then showed
that as a financier he could have given his father points, for in a few
years he doubled the millions and drove horses faster without a break than
his father had ever ridden.

Seward's father was a doctor, justice of the peace, merchant, and the
general first citizen of the village of Florida, Orange County, New York.
And he had no more confidence in his boy William than Vanderbilt had in
his. He educated him only because the lad was not strong eno