Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/149

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 141

Next should come the EngHsh language critically studied, the absolute essential to a refined woman ; next, arithmetic enough to pay the butcher and the baker and keep ordinary accounts ; then, the French language and music and drawing, only if there was a taste for it. I should add dancing by all means, not because it gives grace, for the mind and the character of the company she keeps has more to do with that, but because it is healthful. I add, also, in winter, skating, also the knowledge of driv- ing and of riding a horse. Housekeeping at all times, with its accompaniments of sewing, embroidery, knitting, cookery, etc. etc. After this, I should wish them warmth enough to love and to marry, as the most certain means of happiness to them, notwithstanding the occasional misery of that relation. (I omitted reading and writing and speaking with propriety, accomplishments the rarest of all because they require intellect).

I should also, both with girls and boys, let them earn by useful industry their own pocket money, a thing I wonder is not more attended to ; for it is one of the most im- portant means of producing habits of industry and giving ideas of the business of life and the reason of that economy the want of which is the ruin of so many. Let the girls by sewing, picking berries, taking the place of cook and housemaid, etc. etc., as the boys by sawing and splitting wood, going on errands, working in the garden, tackling the horses and taking care of the team, or in the city by copying, earn their little funds for amusement, to be expended in their own way. In this way we render labor delightful, and the thought of it as the primal curse never enters the head. Indeed, I have often thought that, if I had naturally good children to bring up (I will not an- swer for bad), I could mitigate many of those discomforts

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