e 1: E. Seguin.]

My little nephew was prowling about my sitting-room during the absence
of his nurse. I was busy writing, and when he took up a delicate pearl
opera-glass, I stopped his investigations with the time-honored, "No,
no, dear, that's for grown-up people."

"Hasn't it got any little-boy end?" he asked wistfully.

That "little-boy end" to things is sometimes just what we fail to
give, even when we think we are straining every nerve to surround the
child with pleasures. For children really want to do the very same
things that we want to do, and yet have constantly to be thwarted for
their own good. They would like to share all our pleasures; keep the
same hours, eat the same food; but they are met on every side with the
seemingly impertinent piece of dogmatism, "It isn't good for little
boys," or "It isn't nice for little girls."

Robert Louis Stevenson shows, in his "Child's Garden of Verses," that
he is one of the very few people who remember and appreciate this
phase of childhood. Could anything be more deliciously real than these
verses?

"In winter I get up at night,
And dress by yellow candle light:
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day;
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
And hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me on the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
That when the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
I have to go to bed by day?"

Mr. Hopkinson Smith has written a witty little monograph on this
relation of parents and children. I am glad to say, too, that it is
addressed to fathers,--that "left wing" of the family guard, which
generally manages to retreat during any active engagement, leaving the
command to the inferior officer. This "left wing" is imposing on all
full-dress parades, but when there is any fighting to be done it
retires rapidly to the rear, and only wheels into line when the smoke
of the conflict has passed out of the atmosphere.

"Open your heart and your arms wide for your daughters," he says,
"and keep them wide open; don't leave all that to their mothers. An
intimacy will grow with the years which will fit them for another
man's arms and heart when they exchange yours for his. Make a chum of
your boy,--hail-fellow-well-met, a comrade. Get down to the level of
his boyhood, and bring him gradually up to the level of your manhood.
Don't look at him from th