education, concerning which I was sufficiently explicit. I have seen
many such illustrations of a common evil, and have watched the growth to
adult life of some of these cases of wrecked character, and observed the
unpleasant results which came as they grew older. I have used an extreme
case as a text, because I desire to fix attention on the error which
parents and some doctors are apt to commit in cases of chronic ailments
in children.

As to the miserable sufferers who pass through long illness to death I
have little to say. We naturally yield to their whims, pet and indulge
them, moved by pitiful desire to give them all they want of the little
which life affords them. In acute illness, with long convalescence, I am
pretty sure that the tender mother does no real good by over-indulgence;
but the subject is difficult, and hard to handle with justice and
charity without calling down upon me the indignation of the
unthoughtful. It is so easy and pleasant to yield to the caprices of
those we love, when they are in pain or helpless from illness,--so
doubly hard at such times to say no. Yet, if in the case of a long
convalescence, such as follows, perhaps, a typhoid or scarlet fever, we
balance for the little one the too-easily yielded joy of to-day against
the inevitable stringency of discipline, which, with recovered health,
must teach the then doubly difficult lesson of self-restraint, we shall
see, I think, that, on the whole, we do not add to the sum of happiness
to which the child is entitled.

The mother at the sick-bed of her young child is, however, a being quite
often as difficult to manage as her child. All her instinctive maternity
is up in arms. Deep in the heart of many mothers there is an unconfessed
and half-smothered sense of wrath at the attack which sickness has made
on her dear one. Then nothing is too much to give; no sacrifice of