The first child in a family is its poem,—it is a sort of nativity play, and we bend before the young stranger with gifts, “gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” But the tenth child in a poor family is _prose_, and gets simply what is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities, about the tenth cradle. * * * * * [Sidenote: A child’s crosses.] My individual pursuits, my own little stock of interests, were of course of no account. I was required to be in a perfectly free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to drop everything at a moment’s warning from any of my half-dozen seniors. “Here, Hal, run down cellar and get me a dozen apples,” my brother would say, just as I had half-built a block-house. “Harry, run upstairs and get the book I left on the bed”—“Harry, run out to the barn and get the rake I left there”—“Here, Harry, carry this up garret”—“Harry, run out to the tool-shop and get that”—were sounds constantly occurring—breaking up my private, cherished little enterprise of building cob-houses, making mill-dams and bridges, or loading carriages, or driving horses. Where is the mature Christian who could bear with patience the interruptions and crosses in his daily schemes that beset a boy? * * * * * [Sidenote: Repression.] When children grow up among older people, and are pushed and jostled and set aside in the more engrossing interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the expression of inward feeling,—and yet, often at this time, the instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute. But the child has imperfectly learned language; his stock of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology with which to embody a mere emotional experience. CHAPTER V. EDUCATION. THE MINISTER’S WOOING. [Sidenote: Habit.] A man cannot ravel out the stitches in which early days have knit him. * * * * * [Sidenote: Human error.] All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth’s dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs as a frightful monster. * * * * * [Sidenote: Defective education.] True it is, that one can scarcely call _that_ education which teaches woman everything except herself,—except the things that relate to her own peculiar womanly destiny, and, on plea of the holiness of ignorance, sends her without a word of just counsel into the temptations of life. OLDTOWN FOLKS. [Sidenote: Education of man and woman.]