life is the threshold of his. It is with our eyes that he has first
seen.

Profit, young fathers, by the first moments of candor on the part of your
dear baby, seek to enter his heart when this little heart opens, and
establish yourself in it so thoroughly, that at the moment when the child
is able to judge you, he will love you too well to be severe or to cease
loving. Win his, affection, it is worth the trouble.

To be loved all your life by a being you love--that is the problem to be
solved, and toward the solution of which all your efforts should be
directed. To make yourself loved, is to store up treasures of happiness
for the winter. Each year will take away a scrap of your life, contract
the circle of interests and pleasures in which you live; your mind by
degrees will lose its vigor, and ask for rest, and as you live less and
less by the mind, you will live more and more by the heart. The
affection of others which was only a pleasant whet will become a
necessary food, and whatever you may have been, statesmen or artists,
soldiers or bankers, when your heads are white, you will no longer be
anything but fathers.

But filial love is not born all at once, nor is it necessary it should
be. The voice of nature is a voice rather poetical than truthful. The
affection of children is earned and deserved; it is a consequence, not a
cause, and gratitude is its commencement. At any cost, therefore, your
baby must be made grateful. Do not reckon that he will be grateful to
you for your solicitude, your dreams for his future, the cost of his
nursing, and the splendid dowry that you are amassing for him; such
gratitude would require from his little brain too complicated a
calculation, besides social ideas as yet unknown to him. He will not be