Life With Children

There is a good deal of the life of boys and girls which passes when they are with other boys and girls, and involves some difficulties with a great many pleasures, all its own. It is generally taken for granted that if the children are by themselves, all will go well. And if you boys and girls did but know it, many very complimentary things are said about you in this very matter. "Children do understand each other so well." "Children get along so well with each other." "I feel quite relieved when the children find some companions." This sort of thing is said behind the children's backs at the very moment when the same children, quite strangers to each other, are wishing that they were at home themselves, or at least that these sudden new companions were.

There is a well-studied picture of this mixed-up life of boys and girls with other boys and girls who are quite strangers to them in the end of Miss Edgeworth's "Sequel to Frank,"--a book which I cannot get the young people to read as much as I wish they would. And I do not at this moment remember any other sketch of it in fiction quite so well managed, with so little overstatement, and with so much real good sense which children may remember to advantage.

Of course, in the first place, you are to do as you would be done by. But, when you have said this, a question is still involved, for you do not know for a moment how you would be done by; or if you do know, you know simply that you would like to be let off from the company of these new-found friends. "If I did as I would be done by," said Clara, "I should turn round and walk to the other end of the piazza, and I should leave the whole party of these strange girls alone. I was having a very good time without them, and I dare say they would have a better time without me. But papa brought me to them, and said their father was in college with him, and that he wanted that we should know each other. So I could not do, in that case, exactly as I would be done by without displeasing papa, and that would not be doing to him at all as I would be done by."

The English of all this is, my dear Clara, that in that particular exigency on the piazza at Newbury you had a nice book, and you would have been glad to be left alone; nay, at the bottom of your heart, you would be glad to be left alone a good deal of your life. But you do not want to be left alone all your life. And if your father had taken you to Old Point Comfort for a month, instead of Newbury, and you were as much a stranger to the ways there as this shy Lucy Percival is to our Northern ways at Newbury, you would be very much obliged to any nice Virginian girl who swallowed down her dislike of Yankees in general, and came and welcomed you as prettily as, in fact, you did the Percivals when your father brought you to them. The doing as you would be done by requires a study of all the conditions, not of