“Third, the child must be happier with us than with any one else; it is a question then of making her time pass more pleasantly when she is in our presence than it does elsewhere. That would not be very difficult if the mother was sewing or at housework, was free to talk with her sometimes and to teach her little tasks. In a library, between two desks, where severe research is going on and where silence is necessary, it is quite natural that the child grow weary; above all, if she is forbidden to sing or to chatter, and cannot play with any one. “None of those persons who have written treatises on education have considered the student or those of a similar profession; they have treated the father or the mother as occupied solely in carrying out their duties, everything else being set aside for them. But the case is different here; you must carry on your work, and I am only too happy to aid you in it. I am a wife as well as a mother, and was the one before becoming the other. “Let us try, then, while at our desks to have our child with us, and to see to it that she is happy beside us. For that we must leave her free as much as possible. If nature has not fitted her for study, let us not insist. Let us form her character as well as we can, and let the rest come by inspiration, not by punishment or caresses. Let us hold ourselves to these rules, and I am sure that the child will soon feel the justice and the necessity as well as the effect of our tenderness. “For three days now I have not compelled her to do anything. She reads five or six times a day to amuse herself, and she seems to think that it is a good act. Without entirely lending myself to her little hypocrisy, I nevertheless pretend to be partially, at least, her dupe. In the evening she begs for music and I make a thousand excuses in order to have the lesson short, gay, and easy. The great thing is obedience. There have been scenes, I have punished her and she has wept; but I have pretended not to notice it, and have gone on with my work in perfect indifference. She has been obliged to stop some time, and it has never been very long.” The success was something, for by another spring, when the little one was “six years six months and two days old,” she had commenced to dislike being blamed as much as she did being put on dry bread; she loved a caress better than her doll; reading amused her when she had nothing better to do; and she loved to write and dance,—neither of which fatigued her head,—but could not endure a story which was more than a half hour long; and was still “a hundred leagues from Robinson.”