=Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art. In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts. Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many children in the family for the father to properly support, or the mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the development of either. The coming of new members to the family, however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to