that their grave, innocent eyes may
read our souls more clearly than those of older persons who are not so
easily deceived by our tongues. When your child, although a mere baby
in years, once discovers in you exaggeration or untruthfulness, he
remembers it always, and you, from that moment, lose one of the most
precious joys and sacred opportunities of your life--that of inspiring
his entire confidence and trust, and of leading the tiny feet in the
seldom-trodden path of Perfect Truth.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GOSPEL OF CONVENTIONALITIES.

Young people are proverbially intolerant, so I listened patiently, a
few days since, to the outburst of an impetuous girl-friend.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "we are all such shams!"

"Shams?" I repeated, interrogatively.

"Yes, just that, shams through and through! We, you and I are no
exceptions to the universal rule of, to quote Mark Twain, 'pretending
to be what we ain't.' We are polite and civil when we feel ugly and
cross; while in company we assume a pleasant expression although
inwardly we may be raging. All our appurtenances are make-believes. We
wear our handsome clothes to church and concert, fancying that mankind
may be deceived into the notion that we always look like that. Food
cooked in iron and tin vessels is served in French china and cut
glass. When children sit down to table as ravenously hungry as small
animals, their natural instincts are curbed, and they are compelled to
eat slowly and 'properly.' You see it everywhere and in everything.
The whole plan of modern society, with its manners and usages, is a
system of shams!"

In contradistinction to this unsparing denunciation, I place Harriet
Beecher Stowe's idea of this "system of shams." In "My Wife and I" she
says:

"You see we don't propose to warm our house with a wood fire, but only
to adorn it. It is an altar-fire that we will kindle every evening,
just to light up our room, and show it to advantage. And that is what
I call woman's genius. To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of
sight the hard, dry, prosaic side--and keep up the poetry--that is my
idea of our 'mission.' I think woman ought to be what Hawthorne calls
'The Artist of the Beautiful.'"

Mrs. Stowe is in the right. In this commonplace, fearfully real world,
what would we do without the blessed Gospel of Conventionalities? In
almost every family there is one member, frequently the father of the
household, who, like my young friend,