It Is The Attitude Of The Sensible Hen Towards
Her Ducklings, When She Has Had Frequent Experience Of Their
Incongruous
Ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good
for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar
To her, and she
can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into water. I
need not be told that the hen is after all only step-mother to her
ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman - the
artificial product of our self-imposed conditions - cannot have the
same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to
hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being
practically step-mother to children of another race; and if she is
sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their
seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to
a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which
many authors will have spoken to her in many books:
But though they wrote it all by rote
They did not write it right.
Of all the people outside of the domestic circle known to me in those
days, two individuals only are distinctly remembered. They were
certainly painted by memory in very strong unfading colours, so that
now they seem to stand like living men in a company of pale phantom
forms. This is probably due to the circumstance that they were
considerably more grotesque in appearance than the others, like old
Pechicho among our dogs - all now forgotten save him.
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