I look upon it as a crime for mothers to give up their children wholly to nursery training. The mother should be with her darlings pretty nearly all the time; and if she loves them, she will be. And a mother has far greater influence over them than the very best of nurses.
When babyhood merges into girlhood, one of the first things to be checked is the all-too-easily-learned habit of criticising—generally spitefully—other children she has seen out of doors. This is the first sign of that spirit of tittle-tattleism which blossoms into verbosity, scandal, and all uncharitableness in many full-blown old maids.
SPRING TROPHIES.
If charity and love for all who suffer life cannot be taught by the mother or by a good nurse, then never in this world can a child or girl be truly happy or truly healthy. For a sour and uncharitable soul always goes hand in hand with a nervous or puny body.
Keep your girls busy. Be busy yourself, mother. There is a dignity and grace about household duties that put to the blush all drawing-room airs and frivolities.
But I note that a real genuine young lady is invariably natural and never ashamed to do work that, a “wretched, unidea’d girl” would deem infra dignitatem. I think that this is lovely.
“’Pon honour,” as old military men used to say, I’ve had earls’ or baronets’ daughters in my caravan while gipsying, who have begged of me to permit them to do something for me, and they have hemmed my wind-ravelled curtains, stitched my blinds, filled my pin-cushions—ay, and some would have darned my socks for me, had I permitted them! Now, these were ladies, mind, in the truest sense of the word, good God-fearing girls with hearts full of sympathy and in perfect unison with all the world around them.
Again, as to what some call “menial work,” or household, the girl who learns to cook and serve a dinner, or knows how a meal should be served, or who is not ashamed even to bare her bonnie white arms and help to wash up the delf, the girl who knows even a little medicine and surgery, the girl to whom the gardener will come with a cut and bleeding finger to be tenderly washed and dressed, the girl who can get up betimes in the morning—she is the girl who will make the best wife, and the only wife really worth having.