Watch over your sister, to protect her from any association whatever with bad young men, to minister to her wants, to help your parents minister to her health, and to love her with a sincere affection, for as long as you live, you will find her devotion unchangeable, through good and evil report. This same sister may be your companion all through your life. Where single life becomes the destiny of both brother and sister this often happens. In almost every neighborhood there are two persons thus domiciled, honorably fullfilling their duties to society, and often doing greater public service than any other two people of the community. Look therefore upon your sister as perhaps the best friend you will have
AFTER THE DEATH OF YOUR MOTHER.
Consider her as the person whose interests may be more closely allied with your own than those of any other soul on earth. It certainly cannot lessen your respect for the high relation she sustains toward your life and your happiness. Counsel her in exceeding kindness, for you will find her inclined to retort, as did Ophelia to her brother Laertes, at the head of this chapter, bidding you be sure you "reck your own rede" which was an ancient form of admonishing one to heed his own advice.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that riseth with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter darkness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.—Wordsworth.
ike virgin parchment," says Montaigne, "youth is capable of any inscription." Let us have only those inscriptions which will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before us. "Unless a tree has borne its blossoms in the spring," writes Bishop Hare, "you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn." All through the great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous. The thousands of characters who "strut their brief hour" upon the stage in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and generous, lofty and incorruptible. Then they ripen into manhood, glory waits upon their comings and their goings, and they are soon between two masters, their interests and their consciences. A circumstance threatens their early resolutions, an event overturns their consciences, and a selfish, jealous, ambitious mind thenceforth guides the fortunes of a life.