ish any drink but water, or sweetened water, at
first; and where they do, it is probably hereditary. I have been struck
with their tastes and preferences; nor less with the folly of those
around them, in endeavoring to change them, by requiring them--almost
always against their will--to sip a little coffee, or a little tea, or
a little lemonade; or, it may be, a little toddy. Such children _may_
escape the death of the drunkard or the debauchee; but if they do, it
will not be through the instrumentality of the parents.

I am very much opposed to giving children hot drinks of any kind. If
they are to drink substances which are injurious, as tea or coffee, let
them be cool. I do not say _cold_, for that would be going to the other
extreme. But no drink, in any ordinary case, should be above the heat of
our bodies; that is, about 98 degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. Yet
the precautions of this paragraph will be almost unnecessary, if
children are confined--as they ought to be, and would be, did we not go
out of our way to teach them otherwise--to water, as their only drink.
Cold water is almost always preferred. Not one child in a thousand would
ever prefer it hot, until his taste had been perverted. No writer has
inveighed more against hot drinks of every kind, than the late William
Cobbett--and, as I think, with more justice.

But, in avoiding one rock, we must not, as has already been intimated,
make shipwreck on another. Hot drinks, though they injure the powers of
the stomach, and by that means and through that medium, are one
principal cause of the almost universal early decay of teeth, are yet
less injurious, or at least less dangerous, immediately, than cold ones.
Mr. Locke, in speaking of the sports of a child, in the open air, has
the following quaint, but judicious remarks:

"Playing in the open air has but this one danger in it, that I know; and
that is, that when he is hot with running up and down, he should sit or
lie down on the cold or moist earth. This, I grant, and drinking cold
drink, when they are hot with labor or exercise, brings more people to
the grave, or to the brink of it, by fevers and other diseases, than
anything I know. These mischiefs are easily enough prevented when he is
little, being then seldom out of sight. And if, during his childhood, he
be constantly and rigorously kept from sitting on the ground, or
drinking any cold liquor, while he is hot, the custom of forbearing,
grown into