CHAPTER II.

DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS.

WHEN a young girl returns home from school, or when, not having been away, she ceases to be a school-girl, what are the new duties that devolve upon her? What must she bring to the common stock of materials out of which domestic life is wrought? This is a question that she should ask and seriously consider. The domestic relations have been established by God, both for our enjoyment and improvement. They are all beautiful, all, when their duties are properly fulfilled, calculated to quicken into ever newer and fresher life, the best feelings of our nature, and impart force and vigor to its highest tendencies. The most attractive image under which God can be presented to us, is that of a father; and Jesus, to show the nature of the blessed tie which binds him to the human family, calls himself our brother and friend.

Let me, first of all, guard you against an error which, I think, may be at the foundation of much domestic misery and disappointment. It is that

of supposing that parents and children, brothers and sisters, necessarily love each other, by virtue of the relation which nature has established between them. Whereas, although there is, or always should be, a certain dutiful feeling of obligation to adhere together, and discharge towards one another the duties of kindred, yet affection can be based only upon respect and mutual sympathy and service. When I have seen a father of stern, arbitrary temper, hold over his family the heavy hand of an oppressor, ruling them with a rod of iron; when I have seen the selfish man unceasing in unreasonable exaction, acting always with a single eye to his own convenience, and his own preferences, and making every domestic arrangement solely with reference to his own purposes; both, apparently, receiving the compulsory devotion of their wives and children, as the homage of affection, I have felt disposed to ask, "And do you believe that these can really love you, who see that their happiness is as nothing to you in comparison with your own, and who cannot find in you any of those qualities to which love is responsive?" Such men might be shocked, perhaps, by having such a question put to them, and by being awakened out of their dream, that they were loved and respected as a matter of course, by right of being husbands and fathers. And so also, might women, not a small class, I

fear, discontented, peevish, unamiable, fault-finding wives and mothers, who are inattentive, indifferent to the comfort of their families, irritable towards their husbands, capricious with their children, and arrogant to their servants, without fear or suspicion that they shall not receive a full measure of affection and respect. And when I see brothers and sisters acting unworthily, selfseeking, heedless of one another's convenience or pleasure, jealous of one another, ill-tempered, etc., I say to myself, "Oh! what suffering must be endured, when those are bound together by ties of so intimate a nature, who have not oneness of heart." They who desire to be loved must first deserve to be so, in every relation.

Mrs. Kemble, the great revealer of Shakspeare, once said to me, that it was with Shakspeare as with the Bible, she never opened it without finding something new. And, in illustration, she quoted a line in Romeo and Juliet, which had that day particularly attracted her attention, in which Juliet calls Romeo, "lover, husband, friend," making the last epithet the culmination of all the rest. Now, the father must be also the friend of his children, the husband of his wife, the wife of her husband; the brothers and sisters, of one another. True friendship will refrain from everything that can injure or annoy its objects, and seek for every thing that can benefit them. That word

friend is a glorious old Saxon word. Do all you can to illustrate its meaning.

The relation of brother and sister is, in some sort, a preparation for that of husband and wife. So educate your sons that they shall be to their sisters the type of what a husband ought to be; and so educate your daughters that their brothers shall be made incapable, through association with them, of uniting themselves with the inferior and the unworthy of their sex. If sisters are what they should be, they will inspire in their brothers a true, chivalric spirit, and this will have its proper natural training, in its exercise towards them. Let sisters have that in them which is so noble as to be revered, so attractive as to be lovingly and tenderly cherished, so sacred as to be worthy of all self-sacrifice in its protection and defense, then will the young men have already watched their armor in the sacred enclosure of home, and consecrated it to the cause of honor, truth, and right, before going forth into life's battle-field.

To return to my emancipated school-girl. She must bring with her, first, a conviction that home is a sphere of duty. If necessary, she must cheerfully give the aid of her hands in some of its arrangements. She must be glad of every opportunity, small as well as great, to render assistance in any way to her father or mother, in acknowl

edgment of her great debt to them, rejoicing that she is permitted "still paying, still to owe." If she has younger brothers and sisters, she must make herself acceptable and agreeable to them, by sweetness and patience in her intercourse with them, by sympathy in all their pursuits and enjoyments, avoiding always, unless left by her parents in charge of them, the assertion of authority, which, when assumed by an elder sister, is apt to awaken strong resistance, inspired by the feeling that animated a little boy I knew, who, when about three years old, replied indignantly to an aunt that said, "If you do so and so, I shall certainly punish you," "You aint the one that must.”

If it be true, that little things make up the sum of human life and happiness, this may be especially affirmed of domestic life. As a small speck in the eye may deprive it of vision, and make it the medium exclusively of a sensation of pain; as a pinching shoe or an ill-fitting garment may produce an abiding sense of discomfort, not in the least degree modified by the fact that, in other respects, the dress is all right; so, little faults in ourselves may give great annoyance to those with whom we are in intimate association.

Punctuality has been called one of the minor virtues.

If its place in the scale were decided by its important bearing upon all the arrange