consisted in rearing
one very sensitive and timid daughter, who needed for her development
only an extreme of tenderness, and whose conscientiousness was a law
unto herself, stood utterly confounded before the turbulent little
spirit to which her loving-kindness had opened so ready an asylum, and
she soon discovered that it is one thing to take a human being to bring
up, and another to know what to do with it after it is taken.

The child had the instinctive awe of Zephaniah which his manly nature
and habits of command were fitted to inspire, so that morning and
evening, when he was at home, he was demure enough; but while the good
man was away all day, and sometimes on fishing excursions which often
lasted a week, there was a chronic state of domestic warfare--a
succession of skirmishes, pitched battles, long treaties, with divers
articles of capitulation, ending, as treaties are apt to do, in open
rupture on the first convenient opportunity.

Mrs. Pennel sometimes reflected with herself mournfully, and with many
self-disparaging sighs, what was the reason that young master somehow
contrived to keep her far more in awe of him than he was of her. Was she
not evidently, as yet at least, bigger and stronger than he, able to
hold his rebellious little hands, to lift and carry him, and to shut him
up, if so she willed, in a dark closet, and even to administer to him
that discipline of the birch which Mrs. Kittridge often and forcibly
recommended as the great secret of her family prosperity? Was it not her
duty, as everybody told her, to break his will while he was young?--a
duty which hung like a millstone round the peaceable creature's neck,
and weighed her down with a distressing sense of responsibility.

Now, Mrs. Pennel was one of the people to whom self-sacrifice is
constitutionally so much a nature, that self-denial for her must have
consisted in standing up for her own rights, or having her own way when
it crossed the will and pleasure of any one around her. All she wanted
of a child, or in fact of any human creature, was something to love and
serve. We leave it entirely to theologians to reconcile such facts with
the theory of total depravity; but it is a fact that there are a
considerable number of women of this class. Their life would flow on
very naturally if it might consist only in giving, never in
withholding--only in praise, never in blame--only in acquiescence, never
in conflict; and the chief comfort of s