Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/51

Rh refining educational influences is possessed in families where the affection and innocent gaiety of the girls tempers the hardihood and roughness of the boys. The two sexes growing up together in the household do each other good. The sisters gain in frankness, courage, activity, and it may be, in solid intelligence, if the boys are conscientious; while the brothers become more considerate in act and speech, purer and gentler in thought and word and action.

The sweet, strong bond which nature knits at birth between the children of the same parents, nursed at the same bosom, fondled on the same lap, kneeling at the same household altar, ought to be able to defy the changes and vicissitudes of life, although these affect this relationship more than any other. Sons go forth to battle with the world, daughters marry and enter upon other and nearer ties and responsibilities; still the heart cannot be quite right which does not always retain and respond to the first early claims—the associations identified with childhood. Sad is it when the cares of the world obliterate the tender memories of early youth, or the pride of life dries up or diverts the fountains of affection which welled forth in the home of childhood.

To some true hearts this kindred tie, when it has been stretched across wide oceans to far distant lands, has bravely borne the strain, and grown the tighter by the firm clasp with which at each end