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I know a mother who had the insight to see this, and the patience to make it a rule; for it takes far more patience, far more time, than the common method.

She said sometimes to her little boy, after visitors had left the parlor, “Now, dear, I am going to be your little girl, and you are to be my papa. And we will play that a gentleman has just come in to see you, and I will show you exactly how you have been behaving while this lady has been calling to see me. And you can see if you do not feel very sorry to have your little girl behave so.”

Here is a dramatic representation at once which that boy does not need to see repeated many times before he is forever cured of interrupting, of pulling his mother’s gown, of drumming on the piano, etc.,–of the thousand and one things which able-bodied children can do to make social visiting where they are a martyrdom and a penance.

Once I saw this same little boy behave so boisterously and rudely at the dinner-table, in the presence of guests, that I said to myself, “Surely, this time she will have to break her rule, and reprove him publicly.” I saw several telegraphic signals of rebuke, entreaty, and warning flash from her gentle eyes to his; but nothing did any good. Nature was too much for him; he could not at that minute force himself to be quiet. Presently she said, in a perfectly easy and natural tone, “Oh, Charley, come here a minute; I want to tell you something.” No one at the table supposed that it had any thing to do with his bad behavior. She did not intend that they should. As she whispered to him, I alone saw his cheek flush, and that he looked quickly and imploringly into her face; I alone saw that tears were almost in her eyes. But she shook her head, and he went back to his seat with a manful but very red little face. In a few moments he laid down his knife and fork, and said, “Mamma, will you please to excuse me?” “Certainly, my dear,” said she. Nobody but I understood it, or observed that the little fellow had to run very fast to get out of the room without crying. Afterward she told me that she never sent a child away from the table in any other way. “But what would you do,” said I, “if he were to refuse to ask to be excused?” Then the tears stood full in her eyes. “Do you think he could,” she replied, “when he sees that I am only trying to save him from pain?” In the evening, Charley sat in my lap, and was very sober. At last he whispered to me, “I’ll tell you an awful secret, if you won’t tell. Did you think I had done my dinner this afternoon when I got excused? Well, I hadn’t. Mamma made me, because I acted so. That’s the way she always does. But I haven’t had to have it done to me before for ever so long,–not since I was a little fellow” (he was eight now); “and I don’t believe I ever shall again till I’m a man.” Then he added, reflectively, “Mary brought me all the rest of my dinner upstairs; but I wouldn’t touch it, only a little bit of the ice-cream. I don’t think I deserved any at all; do you?”

I shall never, so long as I live, forget a lesson of this sort which my own mother once gave me. I was not more than seven years old; but I had a great susceptibility to color and shape in clothes, and an insatiable admiration for all people who came finely dressed. One day, my mother said to me, “Now I will play ‘house’ with you.” Who does not remember when to “play house” was their chief of plays? And to whose later thought has it not occurred that in this mimic little show lay bound up the whole of life? My mother was the liveliest of playmates, she took the worst doll, the broken tea-set, the shabby furniture, and the least convenient corner of the room for her establishment. Social life became a round of festivities when she kept house as my opposite neighbor. At last, after the washing-day, and the baking-day, and the day when she took dinner with me, and the day when we took our children and walked out together, came the day for me to take my oldest child and go across to make a call at her house. Chill discomfort struck me on the very threshold of my visit. Where was the genial, laughing, talking lady who had been my friend up to that moment? There she sat, stock-still, dumb, staring first at my bonnet, then at my shawl, then at my gown, then at my feet; up and down, down and up, she scanned me, barely replying in monosyllables to my attempts at conversation; finally getting up, and coming nearer, and examining my clothes, and my child’s still more closely. A very few minutes of this were more than I could bear; and, almost crying, I said, “Why, mamma, what makes you do so?” Then the play was over; and she was once more the wise and tender mother, telling me playfully that it was precisely in such a way I had stared, the day before, at the clothes of two ladies who had come in to visit her. I never needed that lesson again. To this day, if I find myself departing from it for an instant, the old tingling shame burns in my cheeks.