threaten you in the event of your being indulged? It may appear to you that no such danger exists: that your parents are actuated by narrower and meaner views than your own, or that they do not allow for the feelings of youth. But they are in reality deeply concerned for the difference of _your_ feelings from _theirs_; they sympathise with them in secret, from a recollection of what were their own at your period of life; but know, from that very experience of your feelings, and of their result, that it is not good for you that they should be indulged. You are, then, called upon—and I do so now in the name of your best feelings, and as you would wish for present or future happiness—to trust in the reality of that parental tenderness which has never, heretofore, known interruption, and in the superiority of that wisdom with which years and acquaintance with the world have invested your parents. Perhaps, my young friends, you may have perceived, even in the midst of your childish frolics and careless happiness, that your parents were obliged to deny themselves many indulgences, and toil hard in their respective duties, in order to obtain for you the comforts which you enjoy. You may have perceived that your father, after he had returned home from his daily employment, could hardly be prevailed upon to enter, as you wished, into your sports, or to assist you with your lessons, but would sit, in silent and abstracted reflection, with a deep shade of care upon his brow. On these occasions, perhaps, your amiable and kind protector is considering how difficult it is, even with all his industry, and all his denial of indulgences to himself, to procure for you an exemption from that wretchedness in which you see thousands of other children every day involved. But though many are the cares which your parents experience, in the duty of rearing you to manhood, there is none so severe or so acute as that which comes upon them at the period of your entering into life. Heretofore, you were simple little children, with hardly a thought beyond the family scene in which you have enjoyed so many comforts. Heretofore, with the exception of occasional rebukes from your parents, and trifling quarrels with your brothers and sisters, you have all been one family of love, eating at the same board, kneeling in one common prayer, loving one another, as the dearest of all friends. But now the scene becomes very different. You begin to feel, within yourselves, separate interests, and each thinks himself best qualified to judge for himself. At that moment, my young friends, the anxiety of your parents is a thousand times greater than it ever was before. Your father, probably, is a man of formed habits and character; he occupies a certain respectable station in the world; he has all his life been governed by certain principles, which he found to be conducive to his comfort and dignity. But though he has been able to conduct himself through the