Over this they will triumph, sooner or
later. The average healthy child has a native bias towards gracious good
behavior and kindly affections. He will win and be won in the long run,
and, the chances are, have better manners than his father. But the pain
that we give these blessed little ones when we wound their
tenderness,--for that there is no atoning. Over that they can never
triumph, either now or hereafter. Why do we dare to be so sure that they
are not grieved by ungracious words and tones? that they can get used to
being continually treated as if they were "in the way"? Who has not heard
this said? I have, until I have longed for an Elijah and for fire, that
the grown-up cumberers of the ground, who are the ones really in the way,
might be burned up, to make room for the children. I believe that, if it
were possible to count up in any one month, and show in the aggregate, all
of this class of miseries borne by children, the world would cry out
astonished. I know a little girl, ten years old, of nervous temperament,
whose whole physical condition is disordered, and seriously, by her
mother's habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding.
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