The father will work hard, late and
early, saving here, economizing there,
growing stoop-shouldered and gray, but
gaining his point and thinking, compla
cently, of the amount he is worth. The
mother will pinch, and contrive, and
patch and darn, practicing a thousand
small economies that nobody ever sus
pects, and losing even the memory of
the day when she was a bonny, blithe
hearted girl whom her tired husband
used to come miles to see in courting
days. The children who are first in the
loyal, honest hearts that love them,
though they never have time to show it
in any sweet way, meanwhile grow np.
Maria wants to take music lessons, John
wants to go to college, but father and
mother think of the expense, count np
the dollars it will cost, and decide that
a common school education is good
enough for their children as it was for
them. This only sometimes, and seldom
where the parents are Americans, born
to the idea that the son may be Presi
dent one day, and that, as we wrote in
onr copy-books, "Education is the life
of liberty." Oftener the music lessons
and the college course are allowed,
however, and the home economies are
doubled, while it is iu countless little
ways that the love of the-beautiful is
stunted and crushed, and the children
made to feel that of all nnlovcly, hard,
prison-like places, home is the most so.
