which are not given you to play with,” would have instructed him, and hindered similar mischief in the future. How is it that devoted nurse and affectionate father cause injurious “concussions,” moral and physical, to a child’s tender nature? A good deal is to be set down to ignorance or thoughtlessness; they do not know, or they do not consider, how this and that must affect a child. But the curious thing is that grown-up people nearly always err on the same lines. The arbitrary exercise of authority on the part of parent, nurse, governess, whoever is set in authority over him, is the real stone of stumbling and rock of offence in the way of many a child. Nor is there room for the tender indulgent mother to congratulate herself and say, “I always thought Mrs. Naybor was too hard on her children,” for the most ruinous exercise of arbitrary authority is when the mother makes herself a law unto her child, with power to excuse him from his duties, and to grant him (more than papal) indulgences. This sort of tender parent is most tenacious of her authority, no one is permitted to interfere with her rule--for rule it is, though her children are notably unruly. She answers all suggestions and expostulation with one formula: My children shall never have it to say that their mother refused them anything it was in her power to give. “In her power.” This mother errs in believing that her children are hers--in her power, body and soul. Can she not do what she likes with her own? It is worth while to look to the springs of conduct in human nature for the source of this common cause of the mismanagement of children. There must be some unsuspected reason for the fact that persons of weak and of strong nature should err in the same direction.