tial that the family parlors be not too fine for the
family to sit in,--too fine for the ordinary accidents, haps and
mishaps of reasonably well-trained children. The elegance of the
parlor where papa and mamma sit and receive their friends should wear
an inviting, not a hostile and bristling, aspect to little people. Its
beauty and its order gradually form in the little mind a love of
beauty and order, and the insensible carefulness of regard.

Nothing is worse for a child than to shut him up in a room which he
understands is his, _because_ he is disorderly,--where he is expected,
of course, to maintain and keep disorder. We have sometimes pitied the
poor little victims who show their faces longingly at the doors of
elegant parlors, and are forthwith collared by the domestic police and
consigned to some attic apartment, called a playroom, where chaos
continually reigns. It is a mistake to suppose, because children
derange a well-furnished apartment, that they like confusion. Order
and beauty are always pleasant to them as to grown people, and
disorder and defacement are painful; but they know neither how to
create the one nor to prevent the other,--their little lives are a
series of experiments, often making disorder by aiming at some new
form of order. Yet, for all this, I am not one of those who feel that
in a family everything should bend to the sway of these little people.
They are the worst of tyrants in such houses: still, where children
are, though the fact must not appear to them, _nothing must be done
without a wise thought of them_.

Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, "_Ars est celare
artem_." Children who are taught too plainly, by every anxious look
and word of their parents, by every family arrangement, by the
impressment of every chance guest into the service, that their parents
consider their education as the one important matter in creation, are
apt to grow up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious.
The stars cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal
improvement, and the sooner children learn this the better. The great
art is to organize a home which shall move on with a strong, wide,
generous movement, where the little people shall act themselves out as
freely and impulsively as can consist with the comfort of the whole,
and where the anxious watching and planning for them shall be kept as
secret from them as possible.

It is well that one of the sunniest