hollow image, for no discovery is more disillusioning; nor must she officiously intervene if the hardy growing intellect demands a directer communication with the source of all wisdom. The temptation to say: “don’t bother Daddy, he’s busy” is not always due to entirely unselfish promptings. It is better for a child that the direct revelations should come in the shape of mysteriously expressed riddles than that they should be repressed by intervention from the sanctuary, for the riddle, if a good one, may bear unconscious fruit, whereas silence may lead to disappointment and an estrangement which can never afterwards be overcome. There are fathers who, at a certain stage, can step blandly down from the high place, incarnating themselves as it were, and take the novice by the hand which will rest in his as long as may be: there are other fathers who can never quite leave the steps of their own altar. The difference is a matter of temperament. Yet, in either case, the ultimate relations between father and children will depend upon the mother’s tact, sympathy, and power of divination in the earliest stages. Any flaw in her own understanding will here be visited with punishment. The Englishwoman brings a considerable amount of acumen into her parental interpretership, though it consists, perhaps, more in her acute comprehension of a child’s imagination than in profundity of psychological analysis of her husband’s character. She has a natural gift for attaining the confidence of children, putting things to them in the manner least calculated to cause doubt or dismay. Her own illogical mind protects them from the devastating effects of logic upon too tender susceptibilities. I remember so well a father who set out one winter’s evening in pure kindness of heart to teach two daughters the rudiments of whist. All went well, if rather silently, till an awful moment when in a majestic voice—intended purely as a warning and not as a reproof—the father uttered the words: “Why on earth did you trump your partner’s best card?” The reply was a flood of tears and a hasty call for female intervention. Mother would have conveyed the warning with less emphasis and more prolixity, but she would have preserved a disposition for whist which was then and there for ever shattered. These are the domestic pitfalls against which she has to guard, as the speaking tube through which father and children communicate, a speaking tube shortening ever with the years till its use becomes quite unnecessary.