Up and down the study the Doctor paced, with a feverish, restless step, which in all the history of the parsonage had never been heard in it before.
"Such untruth!" is his exclamation. "Yet no, there has been no positive untruth; the deception he admits."
But the great fact comes back upon his thought, that the child of sin and shame is with him. All his old distrust and hatred of the French are revived on the instant; the stain of their iniquities is thrust upon his serene and quiet household. And yet what a sweet face, what a confiding nature God has given to this creature conceived in sin! In his simplicity, the good Doctor would have fancied that some mark of Cain should be fixed on the poor child.
Again, the Doctor had somewhere in his heart a little of the old family pride. The spinster had ministered to it, coyly indeed by word, but always by manner and conduct. How it would have shocked the stout Major, or his good mother, even, to know that he had thus fondled and fostered the vagrant offspring of iniquity upon his hearth! A still larger and worthier pride the Doctor cherished in his own dignity,—so long the honored pastor of Ashfield,—so long the esteemed guide of this people in paths of piety.
What if it should appear, that, during almost the entire period of his holy ministrations, he had, as would seem, colluded with an old acquaintance of his youth—a brazen reprobate—to shield him from the shame of his own misdeeds, and to cover with the mantle of respectability and with all the pastoral dignities this French-speaking child, who, under God, was the seal of the father's iniquities?
As he paced back and forth, there was a timid knock at the door; and in a moment more, Adèle, blooming with health, and radiant with hope, stood before him. Her face had never beamed with a more wondrous frankness and sweetness.
BOOKS FOR OUR CHILDREN
The war is over, yet our fight is not through; and we always, in this life of ours, and especially in this new country and eventful age, have trouble enough to keep our eyes open when they ought to sleep, and our hands busy when they have earned the right to rest. Several knotty questions already begin to try us sorely, although we are confident that the knots can be untied by skillful fingers without calling upon the sword to cut them. We shall settle the Reconstruction problem, the Negro, the Debt, John Bull and Louis Napoleon, all in due time, and without war. But there is a question to be settled which comes nearer home to each family, and which distances all others in magnitude and interest:—What shall we do with our children? how train and teach them in body and mind, by schools and books, by play and work, for that marvellous American life that is now opening to us its new and eventful chapter in the history of man? The Slaveholders' Rebellion is put down; but how shall we deal with the never-ceasing revolt of the new generation against the old? and how keep our Young America under the thumb of his father and mother without breaking his spirit or blighting his destiny? Our brave old flag has swept the waters of all Secession craft, and our iron-clad Monitors do not flinch in fear of the model fleets of France and England mustered at Cherbourg. But what standard rules over our children and youth? and what Monitors are keeping watch over our countless schools and playgrounds? Our people have risen to a new and mighty sense of our national life, and the thousands of Americans who are now returning from Europe say that the tide there has wholly turned in our favor, and Americans are too proud to boast of their country, and are quite safe in leaving her to speak for herself. But how are we recruiting the ranks of the nation from the fresh blood and spirits, the new impulses and passions of childhood? And how does our legion of juvenile infantry compare with the young legions of England, France, Germany, Russia, or Italy? These are grave questions, not to be approached without misgiving, yet not by any means with mistrust, much less with despair. We of course do not propose to try to answer all or any of them now, but must be content with throwing out a few plain thoughts upon the kind of intellectual food we are giving our children, and especially upon the kind of juvenile literature that we ought to encourage. We do not claim for the American child any exemption from the common lot, nor make him out to be above or below the human nature to which he belongs, in common with the children of the Old World. He is a chip of the old block; and that old block is from the old trunk that has been growing for ages, is a great deal older than the father or mother, as old as mankind; and each new comer into the field bears with him some traces or remains of all the traits and dispositions and liabilities that have appeared in the ancestors and become the heritage of the race. Not only the is the American child of the same nature as his European contemporary, but he is born into very much of the same life, the same general circumstances of climate, scenery, morals, and religion, and surely into much of the same nursery talk and juvenile amusement, not excepting books. "Mother Goose" has a nursery catholicity wherever the English language is spoken, that is denied to any other book; and fruitful as America has been and is in children's books, we have not yet apparently added a single one to the first rank of juvenile classics, and have distanced Æsop, Bunyan, De Foe, Edgeworth, and the old fairy story-tellers, as little as we have distanced Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Goethe in the higher imagination.