Life With Children - Page 2

the mere outside accident of the moment.

The direction familiarly given is that we should meet strangers half-way. But I do not find that this wholly answers. These strangers may be represented by globules of quicksilver, or, indeed, of water, on a marble table. Suppose you pour out two little globules of quicksilver at each of two points /. ./ like these two. Suppose you make the globules just so large that they meet half-way, thus, /OO/. At the points where they touch they only touch. It even seems as if there were a little repulsion, so that they shrink away from each other. But, if you will enlarge one of the drops never so little, so that it shall meet the other a very little beyond half-way, why, the two will gladly run together into one, and will even forget that they ever have been parted. That is the true rule for meeting strangers. Meet them a little bit more than half-way. You will find in life that the people who do this are the cheerful people, and happy, who get the most out of society, and, indeed, are everywhere prized and loved. All this is worth saying in a book published in Boston, because New-Englanders inherit a great deal of the English shyness,--which the French call "mauvaise honte," or "bad shame,"--and they need to be cautious particularly to meet strangers a little more than half-way. Boston people, in particular, are said to suffer from the habits of "distance" or "reserve."

"But I am sure I do not know what to say to them," says Robert, who with a good deal of difficulty has been made to read this paper thus far. My dear Bob, have I said that you must talk to them? I knew you pretended that you could not talk to people, though yesterday, when I was trying to get my nap in the hammock, I certainly heard a great deal of rattle from somebody who was fixing his boat with Clem Waters in the woodhouse. But I have never supposed that you were to sit in agreeable conversation about the weather, or the opera, with these strange boys and girls. Nobody but prigs would do that, and I am glad to say you are not a prig. But if you were turned in on two or three boys as Clara was on the Percival girls, a good thing to say would be, "Would you like to go in swimming?" or "How would you like to see us clean our fish?" or "I am going up to set snares for rabbits; how would you like to go?" Give them a piece of yourself. That is what I mean by meeting more than half-way. Frankly, honorably, without unfair reserve,--which is to say, like a gentleman,--share with these strangers some part of your own life which makes you happy. Clara, there, will do the same thing. She will take these girls to ride, or she will teach them how to play "copack," or she will tell them about her play of the "Sleeping Beauty," and enlist some of them to take parts. This is what I mean by meeting people more than half-way.

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