her young child is, however, a being quite
often as difficult to manage as her child. All her instinctive maternity
is up in arms. Deep in the heart of many mothers there is an unconfessed
and half-smothered sense of wrath at the attack which sickness has made
on her dear one. Then nothing is too much to give; no sacrifice of
herself or others too great to grant or demand. The irritability and
feebleness of convalescence makes claims upon her love of
self-sacrifice, and her prodigality of tenderness as positive and yet
more baneful. That in most cases she may and does go too far, and loses
for her child what it is hard to recover in health, is a thing likely
enough, yet to talk to her at such times of the wrong she does the child
is almost to insult her. Nevertheless the unwisdom of a course of
reckless yielding to all a child's whims is plain enough, for if the
little one be long ill or weak, it learns with sad swiftness to exact
more and more, and to yield less and less, so that it becomes
increasingly hard to do for it the many little unpleasant things which
sickness demands. Character comes strongly out in the maladies of the
child, as it does even less distinctly in the sickness of the adult. The
spoiled, over-indulged child is a doubly unmanageable invalid, and when
in illness the foolish petting of the mother continues, the doctor, at
least, is to be pitied.

The ductility of childhood has its dangerous side. This is seen very
well in cases which, fortunately, are rather rare, and, for some reason,
are less frequent in girls than in boys. These little ones observe
sharply the faces and obvious motives of those about their sick-beds,
and more readily than adults are led to humor the doubts they hear
expressed by the doctor or their elders as to their capacity to do this
or that. Too frequent queries as to their feelings are perilously
suggestive, and out of it all arises, in children of nervous or
imaginative temperaments, an inexplicable tendency to fulfil the
predictions they have heard, or actively to humor the ideas they acquire
as to their own ailments and disabilities.

There is something profoundly human in this. With careless, unthoughtful
people, who have trained a child to know that illness means absolute
indulgence, and who pour out unguardedly their own fears and
expectations at the bedside, the result for the child is in some cases
past belief. The little one gets worse and worse. It accepts
automat