As a child, we were stubborn and self-willed, and were frequently treated, not exactly to corporal indignities, but to threadbare schoolroom devices for overcoming temper. Two or three times it happened that, these worn-out means proving as inefficient as “water on a duck’s back,” fatherly authority had to be invoked. It always took one form—silence. For a week there would be none of the happy familiarities between father and child, but, instead, a cessation of the usual pleasant and indulgent intercourse, and now and then a grave look of displeasure as the culprit would make some spasmodic and despairing advance. This was the only punishment which made the slightest impression, and the keen remembrance of it lasts to this day. Sometimes, when we were older, another variety was tried. Instead of being, according to the old code, starved on bread and water in a dark closet, we were seated alone at a table, while the rest of the family ate together as usual; every dish was ceremoniously brought up and served at our solitary meal, and every servant in the house was perfectly aware of the cause; no one spoke or offered us the least attention beyond the ordinary formalities, and we were treated half like a distinguished prisoner, half like an excommunicated person. The result was admirable, prompt in the extreme, and certain to ensure an unusually long term of subsequent docility. Rewards are no less important than punishments. Of these, knowledge and religious opportunities should, in our idea, form the staple. They are thus invested with a personal interest to the child; they come before him as things specially concerning his own good behavior and his parents’ appreciation of it. For instance, the mother reads him Scripture stories and the legends of the saints; he listens with absorption, and longs to read the book himself, but the road through the alphabet and spelling-book is uninviting. Why not teach him through the book itself? The illuminated capitals will strike him by their beauty, the pictures will lend force to the difficult words, and help his memory to connect them with the illustrated subject. Instead of finding church services an irksome interruption to his games, he might be made to look upon them as the highest rewards he can obtain. For a well-learnt lesson in catechism, he might be taught to chant one of those immortal poems, the Psalms; for proficiency in Bible history, he might be taken to some of the most picturesque of our solemn ceremonies, and hear, on the way, of the typical manner in which it is connected with that history; for an act of childish self-denial, he might be allowed to serve as acolyte at Mass. Even these rewards, however, should not be injudiciously multiplied, for familiarity would beget irreverence,—the worst stumbling-block that could be laid in a child’s spiritual path. We think that a Christian education in the early days of childhood could go no further in perfection than