uch had been long
since atoned for. Ingratitude such as this is not uncommon, yet fancy
what it must be to bear! It is hard upon the duckling to have been
hatched by a hen, but is it not also hard upon the hen to have hatched
the duckling?

"Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own. Your
initial character you must draw by lot; but whatever it is, it can only
come to a tolerably successful development after long training; remember
that over that training you will have no control. It is possible, and
even probable, that whatever you may get in after life which is of real
pleasure and service to you, will have to be won in spite of, rather than
by the help of, those whom you are now about to pester, and that you will
only win your freedom after years of a painful struggle in which it will
be hard to say whether you have suffered most injury, or inflicted it.

"Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will;
that you will be obliged to have it; that there is no escaping it; that
you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every
occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time,
no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind will
be a balance for considerations, and your action will go with the heavier
scale. How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you
may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use,
and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the scales were good
to start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered with in
childhood, and if the combinations into which you enter are average ones,
you may come off well; but there are too many 'ifs' in this, and with the
failure of any one of them your misery is assured. Reflect on this, and
remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to
thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no compulsion
in the matter.

"Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to
very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a
man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few
indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the
miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you
have a fine fortune indeed at twe