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shoulders to the wheel and fortune will smile on you. Have something to do, then do it as if the whole world waited on your doing it.

Perseverance.

Lucky for the boy who can say, "In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as fail." Out upon weather-cock men, who change with every wind! Give us men like mountains, who change the winds. You cannot at one dash fly into eminence. You must hammer it out by steady and rugged blows. A man can get what he wants if he pays the price-persistent, plodding perseverance. Never doubt the result; victory will be yours. There may be ways to fortune shorter than the old, dusty highway, but the staunch men in the community all go on this road. If you want to do anything, don't stand back shivering and thinking of the cold; jump in and scramble through. Push and pull!

Fathers' Companionship with Boys.

Happy is the father who is happy in his boy, and happy is the boy who is happy in his father. Some fathers are not wise. They reserve all their social charms for strangers, are dull at home, forbid their children to go into the nicely furnished rooms, make home as irk

some as possible, forget that they were once young, deny their children every amusement and pleasure. Many of the sons of most pious fathers turn out badly because they are surfeited with severe religion, not the religion of Christ, who was himself reproved by the prototypes of such severe men.

We do not remember ever having read of a father's home-life more beautiful and instructive than that of Charles Kingsley: "Because the rectory-house was on low ground, the rector of Eversley, who considered violation of the divine laws of health a sort of acted blasphemy, built his children an outdoor nursery on the 'Mount,' where they kept books, toys, and tea-things, spending long, happy days on the highest and loveliest point of moorland in the glebe; and there he would join them when his parish work was done, bringing them some fresh treasure picked up in his walk-a choice wild-flower or fern or rare beetle, sometimes a lizard or a field-mouse, ever waking up their sense of wonder, calling out their powers of observation, and teaching them lessons out of God's great green book without their knowing they were learning. Out-of-doors and indoors the Sundays were the happiest days to the children, though to their father the hardest.

"When his day's work was done there was

always the Sunday walk, in which each bird and plant and brook was pointed out to the children as preaching sermons to Eyes, such as were not even dreamt of by people of the No-eye species. Indoors the Sunday picturebooks were brought out and each child chose its subject for the father to draw, either some Bible story, or bird or beast or flower."

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Kingsley had a horror of corporal punishment, not merely because it tends to produce antagonism between parent and child, but because he considered more than half the lying of children to be the result of fear of punishment. "Do not train a child," he said, as men train a horse, by letting anger and punishment be the first announcement of his having sinned. If you do, you induce two bad habits: first, the boy regards his parent with a kind of blind dread, as a being who may be offended by actions which to him are innocent, and whose wrath he expects to fall upon him at any moment in his most pure and unselfish happiness; next, and worse still, the boy learns, not to fear sin, but the punishment of it, and thus he learns to lie."

He had no "moods" with his family, for he cultivated, by strict discipline in the midst of worries and pressing business, a disengaged temper that always enabled him to enter into

say,

other people's interests, and especially into children's playfulness. "I wonder," he would "if there is so much laughing in any other home in England as in ours." He became a light-hearted boy in the presence of his children. When broken toys and nursery griefs were taken to his study, he was never too busy to mend the toy or dry the tears.

How blessed is the son who can speak of his father as Charles Kingsley's eldest son does. "Perfect love casteth out fear,' was the motto," he says, "on which my father based his theory of bringing up children. From this, and from the interest he took in their pursuits, their pleasures, trials, and even the petty details of their every-day life, there sprang up a friendship between father and children that increased in intensity and depth with years. To speak for myself, he was the best friend-the only true friend I ever had. At once he was the most fatherly and the most unfatherly of fathers-fatherly in that he was our most intimate friend and our self-constituted adviser; unfatherly in that our feeling for him lacked that fear and restraint that make boys call their father' the governor.' Ours was the only household I ever saw in which there was no favoritism. Perhaps the brightest picture of the past that I look back to now is the draw

ing-room at Eversley in the evenings, when we were all at home and by ourselves. There he sat, with one hand in mother's, forgetting his own hard work in leading our fun and frolic, with a kindly smile on his lips and a loving light in the bright gray eye that made us feel that in the broadest sense of the word he was our father." Writing to his wife from the seaside, where he had gone in search of health, he says: "This place is perfect, but it seems a dream and imperfect without you. Kiss the darling ducks of children for me."

However busy you are, find a few moments at least every day to romp with your boy. The father who is too dignified to carry his boy pick-back, or, like Luther, sing and dance with his children, or, like Chalmers, trundle the hoop, lacks not only one of the finest elements of greatness, but fails in one of his plainest duties to his children. One of the inalienable rights of your children is happiness at your hands. Remember that the children belong as much to you as to your wife, and it is only just to her that the little time you are in the house you should relieve her of those cares that are her daily portion.

You cannot afford to let your boy grow up without weaving yourself into the memory of his golden days. Norman McLeod says: "O

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