eir letters are rare, enclosed checks
are still rarer. They like to keep the old folks informed of the fact
that it costs a good deal to live away from home. They sometimes come
home on a visit; but these are visits; and visitors, even if they do
stay quite a while, do not pay board.

But pecuniary assistance is not all; it is occasionally care and
attention an aged parent requires, the presence of a daughter who
prefers the gaiety of the city to the quiet of the old homestead that
is imperiously demanded. If the parent be feeble or sick, the undutiful
child is criminally negligent; the crime is still greater if there be
danger through that absence of the parent's dying without religious
consolation.

I have said nothing of that unnatural specimen of humanity, sometimes
called a "loafer," and by still more ignoble names, who, to use a
vulgar term, "grubs" on his parents, drinks what he earns and befouls
the home he robs, with his loathsome presence and scandalous living.
The least said of him the better. He exists: 'tis already too much
said.

CHAPTER LX.
DISINTERESTED LOVE IN PARENTS.

LOVE seems to resume all the obligations of parents toward their
offspring; certainly, it directs all their actions, and they fulfil
these obligations ill or well according to the quality of that love.
But love is not sufficient; love is of two kinds, the right and the
wrong; nothing good comes of an affection that is not properly ordered.
In itself, parental love is natural, instinctive; therefore it is not
meritorious to any high degree. But there is much merit in the proper
kind of parental affection, because it requires sacrifice.

There may be too little love, to the neglect and misfortune of
children. There may be too much, to their spoiling and utter
perversion. Again there may be affection that is partial, that singles
out one for caresses and favors to the exclusion of the others; hence
discord and dissensions in the family. The first two forms of
inordinate affection are equally bad, while the last combines both and
contains the double evil thereof. It is hard to say which is the worse
off, the child that receives too much or the one that receives too
little of that love which to be correct should avoid extremes.

Parents are apt, under the sway of natural affection, to overlook the
fact that God has rights over the children, and that the welfare and
interests of the children must not be left outside all considerati