punishment, the child had entirely missed the
severities through her native disposition to get interest and pleasure
out of them as novelties. The mother, in her anxiety to find a penalty
that would take sharp hold and do its work effectively, at last
resorted, with a sore heart, and with a reproachful conscience, to that
punishment which the incorrigible criminal in the penitentiary dreads
above all the other punitive miseries which the warden inflicts upon him
for his good--solitary confinement in the dark chamber. The grieved and
worried mother shut Clara up in a very small clothes-closet and went
away and left her there--for fifteen minutes--it was all that the
mother-heart could endure. Then she came softly back and
listened--listened for the sobs, but there weren't any; there were
muffled and inarticulate sounds, but they could not be construed into
sobs. The mother waited half an hour longer; by that time she was
suffering so intensely with sorrow and compassion for the little
prisoner that she was not able to wait any longer for the distressed
sounds which she had counted upon to inform her when there had been
punishment enough and the reform accomplished. She opened the closet to
set the prisoner free and take her back into her loving favor and
forgiveness, but the result was not the one expected. The captive had
manufactured a fairy cavern out of the closet, and friendly fairies out
of the clothes hanging from the hooks, and was having a most sinful and
unrepentant good time, and requested permission to spend the rest of the
day there!

_From Susy's Biography of Me._

But Mamma's oppinions and ideas upon the subject of bringing up
children has always been more or less of a joke in our family,
perticularly since Papa's article in the "Christian Union," and I
am sure Clara and I have related the history of our old family
paper-cutter, our punishments and privations with rather more pride
and triumph than any other sentiment, because of Mamma's way of
rearing us.

When the article "What ought he to have done?" came out Mamma read
it, and was very much interested in it. And when papa heard that
she had read it he went to work and secretly wrote his opinion of
what the father ought to have done. He told Aunt Susy, Clara and I,
about it but mamma was not to see it or hear any thing about it
till it came out. He gave it to Aunt Susy to read, and af