"I've often wished I had your firmness, Jane: but, after all, I'm not sure that I don't like my own way best, at least with my boys; for plenty of love, and plenty of patience, seem to have succeeded pretty well;" and Aunt Jessie lifted the nosegay from her lap, feeling as if that unfailing love and patience were already blooming into her life, as beautifully as the sweet-breathed roses given by her boy refreshed and brightened these long hours of patient waiting in a corner. "I don't deny that you've done well, Jessie; but you've been let alone, and had no one to hold your hand or interfere. If my Mac had gone to sea as your Jem did, I never should have been as severe as I am. Men are so perverse and short-sighted, they don't trouble about the future as long as things are quiet and comfortable in the present," continued Mrs. Jane, quite forgetting that the short-sighted partner of the firm, physically speaking at least, was herself. "Ah, yes! we mothers love to foresee and foretell our children's lives even before they are born, and are very apt to be disappointed if they do not turn out as we planned. I know I am: yet I really have no cause to complain, and am learning to see that all we can do is to give the dear boys good principles, and the best training we may, then leave them to finish what we have begun;" and Mrs. Jessie's eye wandered away to Archie, dancing with Rose, quite unconscious what a pretty little castle in the air tumbled down when he fell in love with Phebe. "Right, quite right: on that point we agree exactly. I have spared nothing to give my boys good principles and good habits, and I am willing to trust them anywhere. Nine times did I whip my Steve to cure him of fibbing, and over and over again did Mac go without his dinner rather than wash his hands. But I whipped and starved them both into obedience, and _now_ I have my reward," concluded the "stern parent," with a proud wave of the fan, which looked very like a ferule, being as big, hard, and uncompromising as such an article could be. Mrs. Jessie gave a mild murmur of assent, but could not help thinking, with a smile, that, in spite of their early tribulations, the sins for which the boys suffered had got a little mixed in their results; for fibbing Steve was now the tidy one, and careless Mac the truth-teller. But such small contradictions will happen in the best-regulated families, and all perplexed parents can do is to keep up a steadfast preaching and practising, in the hope that it will bear fruit sometime; for according to the old proverb,-- "'Children pick up words as pigeons pease, To utter them again as God shall please.'" "I hope they won't dance the child to death among them; for each one seems bound to have his turn, even your sober Mac," said Mrs. Jessie, a few minutes later, as she saw Archie hand Rose over to his cousin, who carried her off with an air of triumph from several other claimants.