thers in your house.

When the children walk out for an airing, of course they are to be little
ladies and gentlemen. They are not to scamper to and fro; a little gentle
amble with a hoop ought to be their severest exercise. In sending them to
walk abroad, it is a good thing to let their legs be bare. The gentleman
papa, probably, would find bare legs rather cold walking in the streets of
London; but the gentleman son, of course, has quite another constitution.
Besides, how can a boy, not predisposed that way, hope to grow up
consumptive, if some pains are not taken with him in his childhood?

It is said that of old time children in the Balearic Islands were not
allowed to eat their dinner, until, by adroitness in the shooting of
stones out of a sling, they had dislodged it from a rafter in the house.
Children in the British Islands should be better treated. Let them not
only have their meals unfailingly, but let them be at all other times
tempted and bribed to eat. Cakes and sweetmeats of alluring shape and
color, fruits, and palatable messes, should, without any regularity, be
added to the diet of a child. The stomach, we know, requires three or four
hours to digest a meal, expects a moderate routine of tasks, and between
each task looks for a little period of rest. Now, as we hope to create a
weak digestion, what is more obvious than that we must use artifice to
circumvent the stomach? In one hour we must come upon it unexpectedly with
a dose of fruit and sugar; then, if the regular dinner have been taken,
astonish the digestion, while at work upon it, with the appearance of an
extra lump of cake, and presently some gooseberries. In this way we soon
triumph over Nature, who, to speak truth, does not permit to us an easy
victory, and does try to accommodate her working to our whims. We triumph,
and obtain our reward in children pale and polite, children with appetites
already formed, that will become our good allies against their health in
after life.

_Principiis obsta._ Let us subdue mere nature at her first start, and make
her civilized in her beginnings. Let us wipe the rose-tint out of the
child's cheek, in good hope that the man will not be able to recover it.
White, yellow, and purple--let us make them to be his future tricolor.

II. The Londoner's Garden.

Brick walls do not secrete air. It comes in through your doors and
windows, from the streets and alleys in your neighborhood; it comes in
withou