y growing, girl; bear in mind that it is natural
for kittens and all young creatures to be careless and giddy, and try
to be gentle and forbearing while correcting and training her. If she
is good for anything, your care will be rewarded in years to come by
seeing her trying to do all her work in life "as mamma does."

While it is especially expedient that the girls receive this domestic
training, the boys of the family should not be exempt from their share
of the responsibility. You need not dread that this kind of work will
make your boy unmanly or effeminate. It will rather teach him to be
more considerate of women, more appreciative of the amount that his
mother and sisters have to do, and less careless in imposing needless
labor upon them.

Some mothers go so far as to instruct their sons in the delicate tasks
of darning stockings, and repairing rents in their own clothes. There
is a vast difference in the skill manifested by different boys. Some
seem to have a natural aptitude for dainty work while others have
fingers that are "all thumbs." One man, now a father, cherishes a
tiny cushion of worsted cross-stitch made by himself when a child but
five years of age. He is deft with his fingers, and, as the saying is,
"can turn his hand to anything." May it not be that the manipulation
then acquired still serves him?

Another man tells laughingly how, when a boy at college, he would tie
up the hole, in his socks with a piece of string, and then hammer the
hard lump flat with a stone. He could as easily make a gown as darn a
stocking. Tales such as this fill motherly souls with intense pity for
the poor fellow so powerless to take care of his clothing, and so far
from any woman-helper. If possible, teach your boy enough of the
rudiments of plain sewing to help him in an emergency, so that he can
put on a button, or stitch up a rip, when absent from you.

As many men as women have a natural bias for cookery, and there are
husbands not a few who insist on making all the salad eaten on their
tables.

One branch of work in which boys are sinfully deficient is "putting
things to rights." The floor of your son's room may be littered with
books, papers, cravats, soiled collars and cuffs, but he never thinks
it his duty to pick them up and to keep his possessions in order.
About one man in a thousand is an exception to this rule, and thrice
blessed is she who weds him. It goes without saying in the household
that by some