rom life, listen to the experience of those who have
lived, frequent people who have found happiness and met with success in
life. This will much better make them serve their apprenticeship.

Yes, I say, avoid reading all novels, and, above all, the sentimental
ones--those that make young girls believe that husbands are lovers who
spend their lives at the feet of their wives making love to them, and
young men imagine that wives are sweethearts who have nothing to do but
coo and try to look pretty. Let young people read books that will help
make them sensible and cheerful, books of travels and adventures, books
of pleasant philosophy, of common-sense and humour. Boyhood, girlhood,
as well as young manhood and womanhood, should be spent in cheerful
surroundings, for nothing leads better to morality than cheerfulness. If
I had a house full of young people, I would have my house ring all day
long with the peals of laughter of my boys and girls. Fun of the good,
wholesome sort, humour and gaiety, should be the daily food of youth,
and only books that supply it should be given to them.

On the whole, there is not much to choose between the novels of the
realistic school, that would make you believe that the world is full of
murderers, forgers, men and women with diseased minds, novels that reek
of disinfectants, and make you feel as you do when you come out of a
hospital and your clothes are permeated with a smell of carbolic acid,
and the novels of the sentimental school, that would lead you to believe
that all the male and female geese who are their heroes and heroines
have the slightest chance of being successful in life.

People should already know a great deal of real life before they get
acquainted with the way in which it is represented in novels.

CHAPTER XXX

NOW, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH FATHER?

I confess that I am a little tired, and I will say so frankly, of
continually hearing such phrases as 'What is home without a mother?'
'God bless our mother!' and so forth. I should like to use an
Americanism and ask, 'Now, pray, what's the matter with father?'

I cannot help thinking that children would grow just as sensible if they
sometimes heard a word of praise bestowed on their fathers instead of
being loaded with an endless litany of all the virtues of mother.

Mother's love, mother's devotion, mother's influence, mother's this, and
mother's that. Now, father does exist, and occasionally makes himself
u