Life With Your Elders - Page 2

know what you are saying, Theodora and George, just as well as if I heard you. You are saying that you are sure you do not want to go among the old folks,--certainly you shall not go if you are not wanted. But I wish you to observe that sometimes you must go among them, whether you want to or not; and if you must, there are two things to be brought about,--first, that you get the utmost possible out of the occasion; and, second, that the older people do. So, if you please, we will not go into a huff about it, but look the matter in the face, and see if there is not some simple system which governs the whole.

Do you remember perhaps, George, the first time you found out what good reading there was in men's books,--that day when you had sprained your ankle, and found Mayne Reid palled a little bit,--when I brought you Lossing's Field-Book of the Revolution, as you sat in the wheel-chair, and you read away upon that for hours? Do you remember how, when you were getting well, you used to limp into my room, and I let you hook down books with the handle of your crutch, so that you read the English Parrys and Captain Back, and then got hold of my great Schoolcraft and Catlin, and finally improved your French a good deal, before you were well, on the thirty-nine volumes of Garnier's "Imaginary Voyages "? You remember that? So do I. That was your first experience in grown-up people's books,--books that are not written down to the supposed comprehension of children. Now there is an experience just like that open to each of you, Theodora and George, whenever you will choose to avail yourselves of it in the society of grown-up people, if you will only take that society simply and modestly, and behave like the sensible boy and girl that you really are.

Do not be tempted to talk among people who are your elders. Those horrible scrapes that Frank used to get into, such as Harry once got into, arose, like most scrapes in this world, from their want of ability to hold their tongues. Speak when you are spoken to, not till then, and then get off with as little talk as you can. After the second French revolution, my young friend Walter used to wish that there might be a third, so that he might fortunately be in the gallery of the revolutionary convention just when everything came to a dead lock; and he used to explain to us, as we sat on the parallel bars together at recess, how he would just spring over the front of the gallery, swing himself across to the canopy above the Speaker's seat, and slide down a column to the Tribune, there "where the orators speak, you know," and how he would take advantage of the surprise to address them in their own language; how he would say "FranASec.ais,--mes frA"res" (which means, Frenchmen,--brothers); and how, in such strains of burning eloquence, he would set all right so instantaneously that he would be proclaimed Dictator, placed in a carriage instantly, and drawn by