Love for the Black Sheep.=--The attitude of parents toward
the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not
become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the
saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and
affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in
imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and
wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many
crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by
all, and of the greatest help to his mother. The other seemed the
image of his father in all ways, personal beauty, brilliant talent,
and a naturally depraved character. He landed in prison, sentenced for
many years for forgery and long-sustained robbery of a bank. His
mother said with truth that she never had had a moment's relief from
the most wearing anxiety until he was safely behind prison bars, where
he could no longer torture his young wife or hurt anyone else by his
wrong actions. Yet that mother, when he was breaking her heart by his
actions and most willing to do it, never failed in love, in patience,
in deep understanding of his moral twist and incapacity.

A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a
prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers.
She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up
his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her
succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and
at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad
companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better
surrounding.

The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the
moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that
for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most
the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other
patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of
its deep need to insure its parent's service.

=Children's Courts.=--Society has lately become wise and humane enough
to establish Children's Courts for Juvenile Delinquents. These,
beginning merely in "Separate Hearings" in Boston Courts, and assuming
definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread
and more inclusive in character. Now we are securing, as by a recent
State Law in New Yo