When I Think Of Her I Remember With Gratitude That Our Parents Seldom
Or Never Punished Us, And Never, Unless We Went Too Far In Our
Domestic Dissensions Or Tricks, Even Chided Us.
This, I am convinced,
is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that
nature is wiser than they are, and to let their little ones follow, as
far as possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is they
have in place of minds.
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.
One was an Englishman named Captain Scott, who used to visit us
occasionally for a week's shooting or fishing, for he was a great
sportsman. We were all extremely fond of him, for he was one of those
simple men that love and sympathize with children; besides that, he
used to come to us from some distant wonderful place where sugar-plums
were made, and to our healthy appetites, unaccustomed to sweets of any
description, these things tasted like an angelic kind of food. He was
an immense man, with a great round face of a purplish-red colour, like
the sun setting in glory, and surrounded with a fringe of silvery-
white hair and whiskers, standing out like the petals round the disc
of a sunflower. It was always a great time when Captain Scott arrived,
and while he alighted from his horse we would surround him with loud
demonstrations of welcome, eager for the treasures which made his
pockets bulge out on all sides.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 9 of 186
Words from 4964 to 5471
of 98444
