nd every one knows that a child's instincts are no
guide to health. With health, happiness is sacrificed also. There is no
surer way of making a child miserable than by accustoming it to obtain
all it wishes, and to encounter no will but its own. Its desires grow by
what they feed upon. As a French writer on education has well expressed
it: 'At first it will want the cane you hold in your hand, then your
watch, then the bird it sees flying in the air, and then the star
twinkling overhead. How, short of omnipotence, is it possible to gratify
its ever-growing wants?' Accustom the child to hear 'no' and 'must,' but
let these hard words be softened by voice and manner--an art in which
every true mother excels.

But, on the other hand, do not harass the child by needless
restrictions, nor worry it by excess of management. We desire to call
attention here to the words of an eminent English divine and learned
writer, Archbishop Whately:--

'Most carefully should we avoid the error which some parents, not
(otherwise) deficient in good sense commit, of imposing gratuitous
restrictions and privations, and purposely inflicting needless
disappointments, for the purpose of inuring children to the pains and
troubles they will meet with in after life. Yes; be assured they _will_
meet with quite _enough_ in every portion of life, including childhood,
without your strewing their paths with thorns of your own providing. And
often enough you will have to limit their amusements for the sake of
needful study, to restrain their appetites for the sake of health, to
chastise them for faults, and in various ways to inflict pain or
privations for the sake of avoiding some greater evils. Let this always
be explained to them whenever it is possible to do so; and endeavor in
all cases to make them look on the parent as never the _voluntary_ giver
of anything but good. To any hardships which they are convinced you
inflict reluctantly, and to those which occur through the dispensation
of the All-wise, they will more easily be trained to submit with a good
grace, than to any gratuitous sufferings devised for them by fallible
man. To raise hopes on purpose to produce disappointment, to give
provocation merely to exercise the temper, and, in short, to inflict
pain of any kind, merely as a training for patience and fortitude--this
is a kind of discipline which man should not presume to attempt. If such
trials prove a discipline not so much of cheerful f