Well, I notice that you very wisely and skillfully combine instruction with amusement in your management of your little girls. I watched with much interest how pleasantly you were teaching them to be useful, while they found work to be only amusement. “I wonder which of these little girls would like to run and bring mamma a few apples”; and away, in great glee, trotted little three-year-old Kitty, with her little basket. “Would Mary like to help mamma pare this nice red apple? Which, think you, can make the largest paring without breaking?” How happy the little lady was to leave her play and make the trial! Why not make the same effort to amuse and instruct your little boys? “Would you have me teach them to set the table, wash dishes, sew, or try to work?” Do you not believe they can be taught all this as easily as girls? We hold that, in a large family, each one, boy or girl, should be taught to be useful; to help their mother indoors and out, and, above all, learn to help themselves. This they cannot do if allowed to be idle. In the city, and in families that depend entirely on hired help, it is more difficult to train children to be industrious and useful. It is not well to let the young, imitative little ones be much with servants, certainly not unless the mother is there also; and all instructions of a practical nature should be given by her, and practised under her eye. Wealth is by no means to be despised; but when it is so employed as to remove all labor from us, or to so free us from care that we do not teach our children how to make themselves serviceable, it is no blessing, and may become a curse. Those who have begun life poor, and worked their way to wealth by real hard labor, forget, when their children start up around them, how much true, solid pleasure was in their struggle for this well-earned prosperity, and as they relax their exertions and begin to feel the enervating effects of wealth, they remember only the hardship, forgetting the pleasure. Because there is now no absolute necessity for it, they shrink from permitting their children to follow in their early footsteps, and so cheat them out of the strength and independence for which no amount of gold can in any way compensate. But we are neglecting the boys. We will give you an example which will explain somewhat our idea of making children useful, boys and girls alike.