HERE is one quarrel which is as old

THE

humanity itself-the ancient and pitiful misunderstanding between age and youth, or, more pitifully and more particularly, between parent and child. Theoretically, these two should be in the closest alliance, save one, upon earth; but in sad generality they are covertly or openly antagonistic. Through a freakish fault of memory, most of us miss what is most dear.

Obviously, the primary blame rests with the parent. Good people, fond of each other, their country, and their fellow-men, look forward, when children are born to them, to pleasant years of companionship, and while their children are small they are given, for the most part, some fulfilment of this hope. The average child is docile. through its very dependence, and affectionate by reason of its unspoiled humanity. It is only when children cease to be childish and begin to take on maturity that this immemorial tragedy begins to make itself plain. It is possible chiefly because Time, like a wicked enchanter, wipes the clear memory of youth from the adult mind. Most dogmatic statements must be generalities, and to say that the parents in happy alliance with their children are those men and women who remember minutely the vivid emotions of their own childhood, and that unsuccessful parents belong to the majority who have forgotten, is of course a generality; nevertheless, it is a tremendous truth.

A quarrel is most vividly defined as a misunderstanding. One of the sorry jests of life is that most children know, as most parents do not, how children should be brought up. It is born in them, as imagination is born, and, like imagination, is lost with maturity. They know that for confidence they will give confidence; for obvious justice, justice; for true love and sympathy they will walk through fire.

American young people are notoriously ill-bred. Their flippancy and lack of respect for their elders is a byword to the rest of the world. It is not to be mar

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veled at, for they are ill-bred, badly brought up. They have been guided neither by the loose reins of the French or Japanese, nor by the tight ones of the Germans or the English; but rather by a series of jerks. They are the logical product of unusual severities and unusual indulgences, the sport of fads and whims and fancies, unchecked by any determinate philosophy. Any settled method is better than none at all, and the Germans' stiff insistence upon respect accomplishes something, because it is built upon a definite philosophy; just as the French love and camaraderie accomplish something for the same basic reason. Therefore in both these countries grown children are in far closer alliance with their parents than they are in America.

Both French and German parents have some measure of success because they have some idea of what they want, though the French are the more successful. I have no intention of holding a brief for indulgence, but it is a fact, on first consideration rather startling, that those nations where children are most greatly indulged show the most happy percentages of family concord. To a casual American glance neither Japanese nor French children are disciplined at all; yet these children are paragons of politeness, holding their elders and parents in deep respect, and all their lives strongly bound in the glad ties of family affection. French parents really do enjoy the privilege of intimacy with their grown-up children. It seems to us paradoxical that systematic indulgence should have bred this great respect; but if we examine more closely, we shall find that it came not from indulgence, but despite it; it is not a cause, but simply another effect of a primary something behind it-the power the French people have of keeping at any age something of the child's point of view. It is utterly confusing to us to meet a grave man of acknowledged attainments upon one day, and to meet him on the next in silk hat and frock-coat cavorting down the Champs-Élysées at the end of a pair of red worsted reins, shying

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and snorting at blowing pieces of paper. We wonder how such a man can keep the respect of his children until the time when they, too, are also throwing dignity to the winds with children of their own, and forget that love breeds respect much more often than respect love, and that no one of any age will do or think anything that intentionally injures a beloved comrade.

We really want to be good parents, or almost want to. I am constantly stumbling into groups who have childhood under discussion. Should children be punished? Should n't they be encouraged in personality? Should n't progress be stimulated by a system of rewards? Is the Montessori or the Froebel method the better; or, after all, is n't the good old-fashioned, ding-dong way the best? These are questions that all of us are constantly hearing asked; and they do show interest, if no very great amount of intelligence or understanding. There are few women who would ask how hot an oven should be for baking or what kind of material is used to make a hat, and few men who beg their friends to tell them how big a kennel will do for a dog. Children's lives can be shaped to some extent, but they are not positively liquid, and no mold can be invented into which they all may be individually and profitably poured.

It is a mechanical age, and we have grown into placing an insane dependence upon machinery. We like to connect our storage-batteries, and find them charged when we return; we like to wind our clocks, and have them keep running until next Sunday; we expect, when we take the telephone-receiver from the hook, to get some ultimate answer to our summons; and we are always talking about starting children right. But the machine which takes care of a soul is not a modern one; we cannot start it, and leave it with any hope of success. And this saddens and disappoints us; for other machinery has so minimized our duties that we are apt to feel a vague impatience with those duties which are left, as rich men feel most the pinch of small deprivations. It is hard for us to say, "I have these important children, and I shall give them a really important part of my life." It is much easier to determine that they shall be well provided for; for to most of us, however much we may groan and grumble about it,

earning, sometimes even saving, is an exciting and stimulating game. We are temperamentally impatient, and eager that enjoyment shall immediately follow effort. Future rewards have grown too distant to fill our churches, and future companionships too dim for sacrificing any great amount of valuable time in their cultivation.

The fault is a national one, and not confined to any particular class. The society woman has often been accused of turning her children over to strangers; but the farmer's wife, the tradesman's wife, and the women of the tenements are not much more patient than she. When there are not nurses and governesses and tutors, children are driven out of doors that they may not be "underfoot"; schools are a welcome factor in getting them out of the way. When they cease to be toys, they are always discovering themselves to be troublesome.

The intelligence of their children is a constant matter of pride to good parents. They are forever pointing out how their little boy or girl notices this or that; but they seem to feel that they themselves are surrounded by some mystical blaze of glory which renders their own particular actions imperceptible, and although they are constantly worrying lest their children may be contaminated by some outside sight, they seem naïvely certain of their own invisibility. Where they themselves. are concerned, their children are blind and also deaf. It is understood by both parent and child that the parent is the traditional pattern of conduct, but parents are apt to make the unconscious reservation that this means good conduct. The tremendous majority of American families are arranged like two stages which face each other. On one stage the parents sit as critics in an audience, critics in an audience, watching and prompting the play of the marionettes they have created; and upon the other the children, conceiving themselves as audience, watch their two great stars in the morality play of life. They are the more kindly critics, but loose passion, dissension, and little meannesses cannot altogether escape them in a performance which lasts for years. Heredity's back must be bowed under the just burdens of intimate envi

ronment.

But by far the worst fault of this phase

of the attitude of the American parent is that, in ignoring the intelligent existence of their children, they do create some sort of barrier between children's lives and their own. Children cannot be ignored, or listen to comments or discussions upon or about them, without a growing sense of remoteness from their elder's minds and hearts; for they rarely hear a grown intimate of the family discussed in the same impersonal way in the presence of the intimate. No parents can expect their intelligent child to feel truly in their confidence when the child's intelligence and very humanity are persistently ignored. "Children should be seen and not heard," is an idle enough maxim of unintentional cruelty and ignorance, but the custom of expanding this tacitly into "Children should be seen, and neither hear nor see," is far too common and far too costly.

We are rather apt to feel that we are giving a good deal and receiving very little. What we give is support, a responsibility which we have obviously incurred; precept and advice, which all human beings spend with a passionate generosity; and an objective love, for which we expect an unqualified return. We receive the inspiration and joyousness of fresh youth, a love that is reluctantly critical, a persistent worship, and, in most cases, an ultimate physical service which is at least proportionate to that which we have expended. In general, parents get great or little, rather according to their receptivity than to their own gifts. But few of them are willing to give up the key to that sanctuary where their very selves are enshrined.

It is not surprising, therefore, that children, as they grow older, retire more into themselves, and develop that reserve which so greatly puzzles and distresses their elders. Anglo-Saxons have a horror of wearing their hearts upon their sleeves, and even when their hearts are warm and innocent, they are apt to wall them away, like cold and guilty things, not only from

the world at large, but from those most dear to them, to whom these hearts are supposedly of most importance. Little children give their confidences freely, and retire them only when they find them socially condemned. There is a wide difference between being laughed at and laughed with, and a child who has found that an innocent confidence has caused a perplexing embarrassment grows wary lest he again fall into mysterious sin. Whatever his desires may be, the discovery dawns daily on his subconscious soul that he is living in a world of familiar strangers, that society is divided not only by caste, but by age, and that he must find his true intimates among his juvenile peers. Not only do his attempts at intimacy often seem to cause embarrassment, but his very relation to the grown-up world is shrouded in the veils of taboo. Americans have a prudish habit of referring to the newly born as "the little stranger"; the phrase is a cruelly apt one.

Our trouble is not that we do not care, but that racially we are more inclined to act than to think. There is only one comprehensive rule for bringing up children, and that is that we must honestly rack our reluctant minds until they give us back something of our own forgotten emotions; that we must give in measure as we expect to receive; that we must acknowledge the child's mind and emotions to resemble our own in scarcely limited counterpart. Subjective teaching is the only teaching worth while, and sympathy the only kind. of love which will buy us the best. Children learn most by example, and they throw open the doors of their hearts to those who have shown them that hearts have doors. The old quarrel is the most wasteful and unnecessary one. It is human to desire some friendship, and those of us who have children, and in whom the desire is strong, may really know at least one or two men and women a decade or so from now.

Mavor to ask of her papa that morn

ARÍA CONCEPCIÓN, having a

favor to ask of her papa that morning, listened at the door of his dressingroom, which adjoined her own, and tried to augur an auspicious mood from the accent of the abstruse little cough with which he punctuated every delicate task. She heard his measured pacing to and fro, his opening and shutting of drawers, and the clash of dainty cup and saucer as he sipped his black coffee. Her delicate nose identified the aroma generated by papa's hair under the cordial embraces of a curling-iron, and the lilac perfume of the cosmetic with which those rampant waves and the heavy mustache and imperial were licked into lustrous immobility. At lastwelcome sound!-a cough of finality, and Senator Montes de Oca marched forth, serene in spotless, frock-coated, patentleathered perfection.

Not yet, however, would his daughter present herself before him. First he must make his morning reflexiónes, a solemnity which involved his pacing for five minutes the circuit of the gallery, with head bent, and hands clasped behind his back, sometimes pausing to glance over the flowerdecked railing into the patio, or to order his mozo to remove some linnet or canary whose pipings interfered with his cerebral operations. According to domestic tradition, the senator, during that daily perambulation, exercised his intellect to a degree beyond the capacity of less formidable mortals to comprehend. Watching him furtively from the shelter of her room, María Concepción applied an extra coat of powder to her already well-whitened features, and dexterously encircled her large eyes with artificial shadows, those ojeras which promote luster and spiritu

ality. She found time, too, to rehearse a languid comportment, and she gave some consideration to the project of sinking at her papa's feet in a graceful swoon, a manœuver sometimes effective as a stimulant to the granting of special indulgences. Intense in all things, she had an intense desire to attend a brilliant affair at the Plaza de Toros on the following Sunday. All society would be there, and El Mañoso was to kill-El Mañoso, the youngest and greatest swordsman of Spain, who was now to make his first bow to the cream of Mexican fashion. María Concepción had never been present at a bull-fight. Before her arrival at an age for such fiestas her mother had died, and for five years the house of Montes de Oca had dragged through the successive stages of ceremonious mourning prescribed by Mexican etiquette. The senator had testified his grief á lo gran señor, causing the finest chamber in his house to be converted into an exquisite private chapel, duly consecrated, where masses were celebrated daily in memory of the beloved. Upon his daughter, during those springtime years of hers, he had imposed the most rigid austerities. If ever a young gallant found opportunity to make "eyes of deer" at her, though he might possess all the virtues of St. Thomas, the indignant senator would suddenly discover in him all the hypocrisies of Judas. María Concepción often declared with tears to her adored twin-brother, Enrique, that if it were not for her expansions of soul with him, and with the heroines of innumerable surreptitious novels, she she would have perished in the bud. Soon she would be eighteen. That very morning she had discovered a wrinkle, a very little one, it was true, and possibly no deeper than the powder; but it had made her weep. Qué fatalidad!

Decisive as a signal-gun was the cough with which El Senador Don Enrique Montes de Oca y Quintana Ruiz announced to all the world that he had concluded his reflexiónes. The household sprang into audible activity. The great doors of the coach-house rolled open, and the senator's coupé swung into the patio. Now was the ordained moment for the bestowal of his benediction upon his daugh

ter.

Even as the thought came to him, she approached-pale as a gardenia, her hu

mid, dark eyes fixed upon him in a faint smile of reverence, submission, and affection. At what cost of vigilance and selfdiscipline she had studied to obliterate herself until the instant of need, and then to sparkle from oblivion with a smile, her papa never reflected, not deeming it any concern of his to discover the technic by which women compass the proprieties of their sex.

But it did occur to him that

she was growing every day more like her lamented mother, and that observation brought him an access of paternal tenderness as she kissed his hand.

She had brought a flower for his coat, a single violet selected from the mass which Refugio, the coachman's daughter, had placed on her dressing-table.

"But thy papa is too old for these fiestas," he protested indulgently as she sought to put it in his buttonhole. "Have more formality, Conchita!"

"It is so little and so pale," she pleaded -"so pale, dear Papa, that I think it must have grown in the moonlight."

Touched on his poetic side, he unbent so far as to permit himself to be decorated. But then-then, before she could frame the tactful phrases which were to lead up to the theme of the bull-fight, he made an announcement which swept that festival from her thoughts, and canceled every check that her imagination had ever drawn upon the bank of destiny. With an air of conferring an honor far beyond her aspirations, he said:

"Daughter of my soul, thou hast been this morning the subject of my reflections, with the consequence that God has illumined me to guide thee to happiness by making thee the companion and consolation of my remaining years on earth.”

Her eyes and breathless mouth rounded in a trinity of O's. Pleased that his words had produced a palpable impression, and proud of the discretion with which he had attacked that delicate task, the making of an old maid, he coughed rhetorically and continued:

"Thou wilt rejoice that I have made thy future secure by liberating thee from the anxieties of youth and, above all, from the banalities of coquetry. Study to make thyself worthy of the consecration to which thou art elected. Invoke the sanctified spirit of thy mama, who doubtless is in heaven commending us to God. Pre