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CHAP. I.] look pretty." You rarely hear of a chicken dying of cold, but in England more than half of all the children born die under twelve years of age, and they die chiefly from insufficient clothing and improper feeding.

In fashionable circles at the present time, we are constantly hearing of the necessity of making sanitary crusades into the dwellings of the poor; but while I should be the last to discourage so good a work, in my own mind 1 am convinced of the truth of the dictum, that "Charity begins at home." It is unreasonable to blame the working mother, who is half distracted with the problem of how to make both ends meet, if her children are not reared on the most approved sanitary principles, when the woman of fashion can find no time to attend to a mother's first duties, but leaves her offspring to the tender mercies of ignorant servants.

However much time and thought a mother may devote to the care of her children, both are well spent. People are too apt to regard their little ones as pretty playthings made for their amusement, instead of recognizing that they are highly sensitive beings, whose whole future lives are being influenced for happiness or misery by their present surroundings and the treatment they are receiving. Every mother ought to be pervaded with a sense of responsibility which should prompt her to exercise every means in her power to smooth the path of her children to a healthy and happy life. It is true, in a physical as well as in a moral sense, that, as Wordsworth says,—

" The child is father of the man."