The home journal. (Winchester, Tenn.) 1858-188?, 1873-09-04
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.
Unfinished still.

babys boot, and n skein of wool,
Faded, and sOled, and soft; ,
odd things, you say, and no doubt you re rign',
Round Il seaman'S neck TINS stormy niBh',
Up in the yards aloft.
Most like it's folly; but, mate, look here
When first went to sea,
woman stood on the far-of strand
With wedding ring on the small, SOFT mana
Which Clung so close to me.
My wife, God bless her! The day before
She sat beside my foot;
And the sunlight kissed her yellow hair,
And the dainty fingers, dcft and fair,
Knitted baby's boot.
The voyage over I came ashore;
What think You found there?
grave the daisies had sprinked white
cottage empty and dark AZ night,
And this beside the chair.
The little boot, twas unfinished still;
The tangled skein lay near;
But the knittcr had gone away rest
With the babe aisle p on her quiet breast,
Down in the church-yard drear.
CasscNs Magazine
INFLUENCE OF A HAPPY CHILDHooD.-
The recollections of n thoroughly happy
childhood (other advantages not want
ng) are the best preparation, moral and
intellectual, with which to encounter
the duties and cares of real life. A
sunshinny childhood is an auspicious
inheritance, with which, as fund, to
commence trading in practical wisdom
and active goodness. 1t is a great thing
only to have known by experience, that
tranquil, temperate felicity is actually
attainable on earth and we should
think so, if we knew how many have
pursued n reckless course, because, or
chiefly because, they early learned to
think of happiness as chimera, and be-
lieved momentary qualifications to be
the only substitute placed within the
reach of man. Practical happiness is
much oftcner wantonly thrown away,
than really snatched from us but it is
the most likely to be pursued, over
taken and husbanded, by those who
already and during some considerable
period of their lives have been happy.
To have known nothing but misery is
the most portentous condition under
which human nature can start on its.
Isaac 7dylOr.
The GRIEFs OF CHILDHOoD. These
bitter sorrows of childhood when sor-
row is all new and strange, when hope
has not yet got wings to fly beyond the
days and weeks, and the space from
summer to summer seems measnreless.
"Ah, my child, you will have real trou-
bles to fret about by and by is the
consolation we have almost all Oft us
| had administered to us in our child
hood, and have repeated to other chill
dren, since we have been grown up.
| We have all of us sobbed so piteously,
| standing with tiny bare legs, above our
| little socks, when we lost sight of our
mother or nurse in some strange place;
but we can no longer recall the piog-
| nancy of that moment and weep over 1t,
as we do over the remembered sufferings
of five or ten years ago. Every one OF
those keen moments has left its trace,
and lives in as still, but such traces have
| blcnt themselves irrecoverably with the
frmer texture of our youth and man
hood; and so it comes that we can look
ON at the troubles of our children with
smiling disbelief in the reality OF
their pain. Is there any one who can
recover the experience of his childhood,
not merely of what he did and what
happened to him, of what he liked and
disliked when he was in frock and trou-
sers, but with an intimate penetration,
II revived consciousness of what he felt
then, when it was so long from one
midsummer to another? what he felt
when his school-fellows put him out OF
their game because he would pitch the
ball wrong out of mere willfulness or
on a rainy day in the holidays, when he
didn't know how to amuse himself, and
fell from idleness into mischief, from
mischief into defiance, and from def
ance into sulkiness; or when his mother
absolutely refused to let him have q
tailed coat "half," although every other
boy of his age had gone into tails
already? Surely if we could retail that
early bitterness, and the dim guesses,
the strangely perspectiveless conception
of life that gave the bitterness its in
tensity, we should not pooh-pooh the
| griefs of our children. Childhood has
no forebodings but then, it is soothed
by no memories of outlived sorrow.
GeOrge Eliot.
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