d in foolish reading or
careless methods of study. By her own self-respecting conduct she
helps to give them the reverence for self which will insure their
acting wisely. All this is the mother's privilege; and still one more
great privilege is hers, and that is to choose one-half the ancestry
of her descendants. She cannot choose their ancestry that comes to
them through herself; that is a fixed fact. Her parents must of
necessity be her children's grandparents. Her family characteristics
are also their inheritance. The only thing she can do in regard to
their inheritance through her is to modify the objectionable traits,
and to cultivate the good traits herself, so that family faults may in
her be weakened and the probability of transmission lessened, and the
family virtues be strengthened and their probable transmission
intensified. But she has the power to decide what shall be the
paternal ancestry of her household; and if she is duly impressed with
the responsibility of this power, she will not allow herself to fall
in love and marry a man of whose family she knows nothing, or knows
facts that do not promise well for posterity.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE LAW OF HEREDITY.

I once heard of a man who on his death-bed made a singular will. He
had no houses or lands to bequeath his children, but he had observed
that they had inherited much from him, and so he made a formal bequest
to them of that which they already possessed.

He wrote: "I bequeath to my son John my big bony frame and the
slouching gait I acquired by carelessness, also my inherited tendency
to consumption. To my daughter Mary I bequeath my sallow complexion
and torpid liver, which are the result of my gross living; also my
melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life.
To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable
disposition; to my daughter Jane my coarseness of thought and my
unwillingness to be restrained in my desires, and also my tendency to
commit suicide."

"A very strange will," said everybody, and yet it was a will that was
probated long before the testator's death. That it gave perfect
satisfaction I will not assert, but it was never contested and paid no
fees to lawyers.

Just such wills are being made daily by the lives and conduct of
young people, though they are not put into writing. Some time in the
future, however, they will be written into "living epistles, known and
read of all