What is it? Pretty Lucy’s face clouds into sullenness. Kind Harry is quick to take offence, and his outbursts spoil people’s comfort. Willie, with all his nonsense, has fits of positive moroseness. Tom argues--is always in the right. Alice--is the child always quite straightforward? There is reason enough for the strain of anxiety that mingles with the mother’s joy. It is not easy to keep eight or nine young people at their best for weeks together, without their usual employments, when you consider that, wanting their elders’ modicum of self-control, they may have their father’s failings, and their mother’s failings, and ugly traits besides hardly to be accounted for. Is it a counsel of perfection that mothers should have “Quiet Days” of rest for body and mind, and for such spiritual refreshment as may be, to prepare them for the exhausting (however delightful) strain of the holidays? Much arrears of work must fall to the heads of the house in the young folk’s holidays. They will want to estimate, as they get opportunity, the new thought that is leavening their children’s minds; to modify, without appearing to do so, the opinions the young people are forming. They must keep a clear line of demarcation between duties and pastimes, even in the holidays; and they must resume the work of character-training, relinquished to some extent while the children are away at school. But, after all, the holiday problem is much easier than it looks, as many a light-hearted mother knows. There is a way of it, a certain “Open sesame,” which mothers know, or, if they do not, all the worse for the happiness of Holiday House. Occupation? Many interests? Occupation, of course; we know what befalls idle hands; but “interests” are only successful in conjunction with the password; without it, the more excitingly interesting the interests the more apt are they to disturb the domestic atmosphere and make one sulky, and another domineering, and a third selfish, and each “naughty” in that particular way in which “’tis his nature to.” Every mother knows the secret, but some may have forgotten the magic of it. Paradoxical as the statement may sound, there is no one thing of which it is harder to convince young people than that their parents love them. They do not talk about the matter, but supposing they did, this would be the avowal of nine children out of ten: “Oh, of course, mother loves me in a way, but not as she loves X.” “How ‘in a way’?” “You know what I mean. She _is_ mother, so of course she cares about things for me and all that.” “But how does she love X.?” “Oh, I can’t explain; she’s fond of her, likes to look at her, and touch her, and--now don’t go and think I’m saying things about mother. She’s quite fair and treats us all _just_ alike; but who could help liking X. best? I’m so horrid! Nobody cares for me.”