Put most of the children (including X.) of good and loving parents into the Palace of Truth, children of all ages, from six, say, to twenty, and this is the sort of thing you would get. Boys would, as a rule, credit “mother,” and girls, “father,” with the more love; but that is only by comparison; the one parent is only “nicer” than the other. As for appropriating or recognising the fulness of love lavished on them, they simply do not do it. And why? Our little friend has told us; mother and father are quite fair, there is no fault to be found in them, but “I’m so horrid, nobody cares for me.” There you have the secret of “naughtiness.” There is nothing more pathetic than the sort of dual life of which the young are dimly conscious. On the one hand there are premonitions of full and perfect being, the budding wings of which their thoughts are full, and for which their strong sense of justice demands credit. Mother and father ought to know how great and good and beautiful they are in possibility, in prospective. They must have the comprehension, appreciation, which, if they cannot get in the drawing-room, they will seek in the kitchen or the stable-yard. Alnaschar visions? If so, it is not young Alnaschar, but his parents, who kick over the basket of eggs. If the young folk are pugnacious about their “rights,” and are over-ready with their “It’s not fair!” “It’s a shame!” it is because they reckon their claims by the great possible self, while, alas! they measure what they get by the actual self, of which they think small things. There is no word for it but “horrid;” bring them to book, and the scornful, or vain, or bumptious young persons we may know are alike in this--every one of them is “horrid” in his or her own eyes. Now, if you know yourself to be horrid, you know that, of course, people do not love you; how can they? They are kind to you and all that, but that is because it’s their business, or their nature, or their duty to be kind. It has really nothing to do with you personally. What you want is some one who will find you out, and be kind to you, and love you just for your own sake and nothing else. So do we reason when we are young. It is the old story. The good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do. Only we feel things more acutely when we are young, and take sides alternately with ourselves and against ourselves; small is the wonder that their elders find young people “difficult;” that is just what they find themselves. “Fudge!” says the reader, who satisfies himself with the surface, and recalls the fun and frolic and gaiety of heart, the laughter and nonsense and bright looks of scores of young people he knows: of course they are gay, _because_ they are young; but we should have many books about the sadness of youth if people in their “teens” might have the making of them. Glad and sad are not a whole octave apart.