lives which are temporarily kindled and stimulated
by excitement of any kind.

This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing in all our
mismanagements and perversions of the physical life of our children. Their
beautiful elasticity and strength rebound instantly to an apparently
uninjured fulness; and so we go on, undermining, undermining at point
after point, until suddenly some day there comes a tragedy, a catastrophe,
for which we are as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, instead
of to hasten it. Who shall say when our boys die at eighteen, twenty,
twenty-two, our girls either in their girlhood or in the first strain of
their womanhood,--who shall say that they might not have passed safely
through the dangers, had no vital force been unnecessarily wasted in their
childhood, their infancy?

Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much investment of physical
capital for years to come. Every hour after dark that a child is awake is
just so much capital withdrawn. Every hour that a child lives a quiet,
tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on hearths, squirrels
in sunshine, is just so much investment in strength and steadiness and
growth of the nervous system. Every hour that a child lives a life of
excited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a ball-room, is just
so much taken away from the reserved force which enables nerves to triumph
through the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of later
life. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonable
hours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matter
how long it may be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out that
to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transform
the apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey. Who shall say
that to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, an
unwholesome supper of chicken salad and champagne may not leave as lasting
effects on the constitution of a child?

If Nature would only "execute" her "sentences against evil works" more
"speedily," evil works would not so thrive. The law of continuity is the
hardest one for average men and women to comprehend,--or, at any rate, to
obey. Seed-time and harvest in gardens and fields they have learned to
understand and profit by. When we learn, also, that in the precious lives
of these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, and we must reap
all w