e carefulness of regard.

Nothing is worse for a child than to shut him up in a room which he
understands is his, _because_ he is disorderly,--where he is expected,
of course, to maintain and keep disorder. We have sometimes pitied the
poor little victims who show their faces longingly at the doors of
elegant parlors, and are forthwith collared by the domestic police and
consigned to some attic-apartment, called a play-room, where chaos
continually reigns. It is a mistake to suppose, because children derange
a well-furnished apartment, that they like confusion. Order and beauty
are always pleasant to them as to grown people, and disorder and
defacement are painful; but they know neither how to create the one nor
to prevent the other,--their little lives are a series of experiments,
often making disorder by aiming at some new form of order. Yet, for all
this, I am not one of those who feel that in a family everything should
bend to the sway of these little people. They are the worst of tyrants
in such houses,--still, where children are, though the fact must not
appear to them, _nothing must be done without a wise thought of them_.

Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, "_Ars est celare
artem_." Children who are taught too plainly by every anxious look and
word of their parents, by every family-arrangement, by the impressment
of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider
their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow
up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. The stars
cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal improvement, and the
sooner children learn this, the better. The great art is to organize a
home which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous movement, where
the little people shall act themselves out as freely and impulsively as
can consist with the comfort of the whole, and where the anxious
watching and planning for them shall be kept as secret from them as
possible.

It is well that one of the sunniest and airiest rooms in the house be
the children's nursery. It is good philosophy, too, to furnish it
attractively, even if the sum expended lower the standard of
parlor-luxuries. It is well that the children's chamber, which is to act
constantly on their impressible natures for years, should command a
better prospect, a sunnier aspect, than one which serves for a day's
occupancy of the transient guest. It is well that jo