the habits which mark our private lives. Indeed, the fact that they are habits, seems to stamp them with a kind of excusability, if I may be allowed the expression; though we lament over them in tones of contrition before our friends, and even believe in our sincerity when we pray to have them forgiven. But if we can thus excuse ourselves a few secretly-cherished faults, and if we are sometimes content to pursue our earthly pilgrimage under the pressure of the burden of which we still complain, surely the mother, in contemplating the future character of her child, will not allow herself to suppose that the same plea will be available here. No; neither ignorance nor habit, those two strongholds of the human soul under which it so often takes refuge, fondly believing that they will cover a multitude of sins; neither the one, nor the other, will serve the mother's purpose now. What she has condemned in the management of her parents, she is bound the more scrupulously to avoid in her own—what she has grown too old to correct in herself, she has Do excuse for not preventing in her child.
Beyond this, there is mixed up with many of the duties of advanced experience, a spirit of heaviness, a sense of depression owing to the many failures of youth's golden hopes—a fainting of the soul under the manifold conflicts it has had to wage, which, though by no means beyond the reach of religious consolation to soothe and to alleviate, has a deadening effect upon the exercise of energy, both in worldly and in spiritual things. Happily for the young life over which the mother watches, it knows no shadow from such clouds as these. Youth enters freshly and gayly upon its untried career, and not all the failures of the thousands, and tens of thousands who have already erred and strayed from the right path, have power to damp the ardor and the hope with which it eagerly pursues each object of desire. And how beautiful and encouraging to the time-worn parent is this fresh spring of existence when her own has lost its elasticity and power! To her it may sometimes appear that scarcely anything in the world is worth the effort necessary to obtain it. But to her child how different! Supply but a sufficient motive, and the energy is there; point out a course of action, and the im-
