Kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud is in the garden; the one the most beautiful of all young creatures, the other the loveliest of all opening flowers. The rose loses only something in delicacy by its developement,—enough to make it a serious emblem to a pensive mind; but if a cat could remember kittenhood, as we remember our youth, it were enough to break a cat's heart, even if it had nine times nine heart strings. Do not the flowers spring fresh and gay, Pleasant and sweet, in the month of May; And when their time cometh they fade away.[2] [Footnote 2: LUSTY JUVENTUS.] It is another saying of the Laureate's, according to _On-dit_, that, “live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.” They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back upon them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them. But in how strong a light has this been placed by the American teacher Jacob Abbott whose writings have obtained so wide a circulation in England. “Life, he says, if you understand by it the season of preparation for eternity, is more than half gone;—life so far as it presents opportunities and facilities for penitence and pardon,—so far as it bears on the formation of character, and is to be considered as a period of probation,—is unquestionably more than half gone, to those who are between fifteen and twenty. In a vast number of cases it is more than half gone, even in _duration_: and if we consider the thousand influences which crowd around the years of childhood and youth, winning us to religion, and making a surrender of ourselves to Jehovah easy and pleasant,—and, on the other hand, look forward beyond the years of maturity, and see these influences losing all their power, and the heart becoming harder and harder under the deadening effects of continuance in sin,—we shall not doubt a moment that the years of immaturity make a far more important part of our time of probation than all those that follow.” That pious man, who, while he lived, was the Honourable Charles How, and might properly now be called the honoured, says, that, “twenty years might be deducted for education, from the three score and ten, which are the allotted sum of human life; this portion,” he observes, “is a time of discipline and restraint, and young people are never easy till they are got over it.”