It is a sad truth that there is no systematic preparation made to meet the duties of maternity. I have never heard of a school for maternal studies; I have yet to discover a professor of the art of child-rearing. Whatever a young mother knows, she has picked up incidentally; she has never been taught anything of what she should know; such knowledge has likely in part been carefully concealed from her. What she learns, too, incidentally, is apt to be traditional and largely out of keeping with modern ideas-a lot of antiquated rubbish, not a little of which is harmful. There is really not much serious attention given to the means by which noble men and women may be produced; less even than was given ages ago; less than was given by the Spartans. Is not this a grave defect in our civilization? Thoughtful men like Andrew Combe and Herbert Spencer have pronounced it simply monstrous. The management of children should be one of the leading items in the list of studies pursued in schools for females. When shall it be given even a place? It is hard to hope that it will be soon, since as yet no matters of health are regarded as they should be. But it cannot be doubted that the time will come when a knowledge of how to preserve and foster health of body and mind will be valued more highly than a knowledge of the higher mathematics, or of any of many branches which are now carefully taught, although of infinitely little value in after-life.

It is all wrong to assume, as seems to be usually done, that a mother knows instinctively how to rear a family; to be equipped to perform her part properly demands much earnest study. Indeed, I hazard little in saying that the most thoroughly informed student of the human organism, physical and mental, is not entirely competent to take charge of a child to the best possible purpose. Body and mind are each wonderfully complex, and consequently it is not only difficult to bring the best means to bear to assist in their unfoldment, but it is easy to start distempers in them. A mother should be deeply versed in all such

But if a mother has not sound sense, as well as much knowledge, the latter will not be of great advantage to her. There is plenty of room for the exercise of good judgment daily in the rearing of the young. There can be no set rules to follow blindly. The wants of every child are, to a considerable extent, special, and they vary with the age; hence it is impossible to minister to them without thought. Open, observing eyes, with both knowledge and the faculty of applying it properly, must be possessed by a mother, or she cannot fill her great office worthily.

Knowledge and sound sense, however, are not all that is requisite in a mother. Of greater importance than either, perhaps, is fidelity. To act her part creditably she must have ingrained in her nature an inflexible desire to do right by her child by day and by night and under all circumstances. If she is animated with the proper spirit, she will labor patiently and unselfishly; she will never regard her services as irksome, nor let her own concerns divert her from her post of duty.

And blessed is the child, and truly blessed only he, whose mother is possessed of fidelity, sound sense, and knowledge. Such a one needs nothing else to prove his birth auspicious. Even if born in a cot he is rich indeed. His is a fortune beside which money is of small worth. Personal gifts and graces are an inestimable treasure, and the memory of a good mother and a happy childhood are of more value than silver and gold. These are things, and these the chiefest, which ennoble a man and fit him for a noble career.

Of the reward of the worthy mother what shall I say? The consciousness of doing good, the glow of satisfaction which springs from helping others, are in themselves a splendid recompense. The love of children, however, is a rich source of delight, a precious inspiration; but apart from

speedy exodus from his presence, and he uttered the command in gruff and contemptuous tones.

On this occasion said friend was the specially favored observer of a rather romantic episode for so stern and practical a stage as the war officeproof again that Venus has her camp as well as Mars. He witnessed a variation of the cold war needle from the pole of strict business. He saw the iron Secretary melted, and his action moulded counter to his judgment. A woman did it; she disclosed his kinship to our common frail humanity.

Just in advance of my informant, waiting within the line whose high and low got their grists ground as at the country mill,-in the order of their coming, stood and marked time a gay and jaunty little woman, a bright, black-eyed young lady,a bewitching, brunette sample of Southern girls at seventeen, from one of the valleys of Virginia.

He felt a wonder as to what might be her mission, long before she neared the god of war; in fact he rather hoped, no matter what the burden of her errand, that she would win. And when she stood at last before the high desk, and, through a single tear, so fitting it seemed made to order, smiled upward into the face of the Secretary, my friend stood close beside her, an involuntary but not unwilling listener to her story and Mr. Stanton's reception of her petition.

"Good Mr. Secretary," the girl began, in a tone sweet even to its touch of tremor, "my only brother is confined in Capitol Prison. I haven't seen him for more than three years; I love him dearly; I want to go into the prison and see him and carry him some little things from home and our old mother; I'll touch nothing there, and speak to nobody but brother. Say, please, Mr. Secretary, can't I go in ?"

"No, miss!" responded the Secretary, with patriotic sternness. "You can't enter the prison unless you go to stay."

'Why not, sir, please? What harm can I do

there?"

447

My friend thought it was already apparent that Mr. Stanton was sacrificing his usual celerity to some unusual charm. The rebellious maiden had carried the outer works of the grim castle, the iron man; she had induced in him an inclination to linger over her petition. A man behind the request to visit a rebel brother would probably have been forced to leave without further answer than the negative monosyllable.

The young girl knew the advantage which grace of face and manner gave her, and renewed the charge. She hastily brushed from her blooming cheek another tear, as dew-drop from a morning flower, and beseechingly pressed her face a little nearer to Mr. Stanton's, who all the while looked at nothing else.

Tenderly she began to make confession, and soon covered it with logic in these words: "Now, kind Mr. Secretary, I know very well that I'm only a rebel, and so is brother; but he's a real good brother. And I didn't bring on this awful war, nor did brother; and it won't prolong the war a single bit for you, in your goodness of heart, just to let me go into the Capitol Prison and carry Brother Charley some clean shirts and handker chiefs, and a box of goodies to eat; now, would it ?"

The Secretary looked at her steadily, as if he liked to, and as if a small debating society were holding animated session within him, but made no reply.

She continued: "Just think, please; I haven't seen Charley for 'most four years! What if your boy was down in Libby, and you hadn't seen him for so long a time! Wouldn't you like to be let in and out again?"

"But I shouldn't be," Mr. Stanton laconically retorted.

"Perhaps not," admitted the girl, somewhat reluctantly. But directly she hastened to strengthen her weak point.

"Still, you know, Mr. Secretary," she said, with a good deal more pathos than most Sundayschool teachers put into their expression of the same sentiment, "you know it's not as others do unto us that we are told to do unto them, but as we'd like to have them do unto us."

Mr. Stanton was "too far gone" to permit his taking shelter in such a presence behind so bitter a remembrance as that "the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." He had kept

his eyes on the pretty panorama of shifting smiles and tears, while his loyal right hand mechanically kept jabbing the point of his pen into the wellinked blotting-pad that lay on the desk before him. Evidently his mind was temporarily half-off business.

Suddenly he came back to himself as from pleasing dissipation. Seeming hardly to have comprehended the wish of the girl, he hurriedly asked: "What, Miss did you say you wanted ?"

and that it would not be like himself to linger longer over even so interesting a case, and only replied, smiling:

"Not now; you've already got one victory over my judgment; so you must be satisfied for this time. But you may come again if you like."

The young lady silently drew her Southern drapery about her petite form, left a parting smile with the Secretary, and went away, but not as one without hope.

My friend felt himself on ground where he

"Oh, yes! I remember now. Well, well," he continued, "you shall see him and take him some things. Here, you have your wish," handing back her petition favorably endorsed; "go and be happy."

She showered her benefactor with grateful words and looks, and withdrew from the desk. But before my friend could get the bewildered attention of the War Department, back whisked the pretty rebel and resumed her cause; rather, issued a supplement to it.

"You've been very kind to me, Mr. Secretary, to let me see my prison brother, and take him some home comforts too. Now, if he will solemnly promise-and I know he will, for he wants to see mother ever so much-if he will promise not to go into the rebel army again, won't you be so good as to let me take him home with me?"

Certainly the Secretary appeared not a little dazed by the extravagance of the girl's sudden. request; but he also seemed to feel the heavy frowns of the long line of petitioners in waiting,

as he leaned over that high desk, like some lecturers, he began with a prelude that held no relevancy to his mission-in-chief. One eye of the tall Illinoisan twinkled with a knowing wink, and one corner of his large mouth twitched merrily as he accosted the citizen manipulator of the army. And from the broad face of the Secretary there had not yet wholly faded that peculiarly pleased expression which only the ways and the words of a charming woman can call up.

"My dear Secretary," remarked my friend playfully, "I've been watching you under fire from a rebel sharpshooter, and I didn't feel sorry to see you hit near the heart. You dropped' very handsomely."

Mr. Stanton briskly returned that telegraphic, complimentary smile sometimes exchanged between men just after the lady has left the room, and ended this interlude in martial affairs with this brief and honest confession :

"But she was very attractive, wasn't she?" Of course the "attraction" did call again, and took Brother Charley home with her. The Secretary really couldn't help it.

GLIMPSE XVII.-TRYING HER POWER.

CYN NEWELL was not quite so happy as Cyn Meredith had been, though Mr. Newell was, as husbands go, very indulgent; but even such as Cyn must submit to the quiet moulding of Nature's laws, and time had at last opened her eyes to the fact that this world is not of the unchanging, roseate hue that upon the morning of her first marriage she had deemed it.

Then, too, she had loved Burton as well as she was capable of loving, and so it was as much her first and only love as though she had loved him with a deeper and less selfish affection.

This second marriage was just a mere business venture; money was needed; funds were daily lessening; she must form a partnership with capital. Upon her part was beauty and style, which she considered amply equivalent to his investment when the he should be found.

Willis Newell had always over-appreciated her charms, and too soon presented himself as the willing victim. His manhood had been passed accumulating wealth, not in analyzing character, and he never dreamed that it was his capital, and not himself, to which Cyn was so smilingly complacent; never thought it possible that Cyn's coyness during her widowhood proceeded from aught but a desire to rebuke any unseemly haste that might be construed by the uncharitable into disrespect for the departed.

Yet those clear judges, the world, discussed the matter freely, and with one accord said, "H'm, waiting to see if perchance there may not be a richer opportunity." The world was correct, and the few years of wedded life have not been of that unalloyed bliss that Willis Newell fondly expected. Cyn found it more difficult always to look bright and care-free in a strange hotel in a strange city than in the home where she had been from her earliest girlhood, the admired centre of any company she chose to honor with her presence. Here she was a stranger, with no other companion than Amy, and she and her daughter were not models of congeniality.

When her husband came to his meals or home at night, ready to escort his wife and step-daugh

VOL. XVI.-29

ter to lecture, theatre, or opera, it was not as though one had come whose presence made her life joyous and complete, whose absence made it seem barren indeed. What value to her were entertainments in a large city? She was there but one beautiful woman among hundreds as attractive as herself. A mere stranger, attended by an ordinary man and a grown young lady, she attracted little notice or attention. Could she have heard the comments, they would only have been, "Rather a nice looking family party." And who could thrive upon such light flattery as that?

In her country home, wherever Cyn went, she was the one woman among women, and she knew it well. It paid to dress when she knew that it would be the talk for weeks thereafter; that when she entered a room each gentleman glanced admiringly at her; that each woman inventoried her wardrobe enviously, knowing, in country. phrase, that she would have to take "a back seat," now Cyn had arrived.

But here it was different; Cyn, with the most elaborate toilets that Newell could afford her, was yet forced to see that she was easily outshone by the many wealthier dames, and in seeing this she suffered constant mortification and chagrin. If she could induce Willis to retire and return to their native town, with her New York knowledge she could make a display such as would establish her as queen of the village forever; and here she was just nobody!

Amy had heard this reiterated in various forms until she was tired and disgusted, and her heart sympathized with Mr. Newell, for whom she had the utmost respect. This beautiful spring morning she is longing for her mother to go out with her and enjoy the refreshing new-born sweetness of the air, but she must needs "possess her soul in patience" and listen to her mother as for the thousandth time she badgers Willis about providing for Burton.

This Willis has always sternly refused to do. He has considered that if he and Cyn were in a home of their own, the son and daughter ought to have the privilege of living with their mother