Part 12
A young army officer lay dying, at the close of our American civil war. He had been much away from home even before the war; and now for four years he had been a soldier in active army service. On many a field of battle he had faced death fearlessly, and in many an hour of privation and hardship he had been dependent on his own strength and resources. What could more have tended to wean a man from reliance on a mother’s presence and sustaining care? The soldier’s mind was wandering now. It was in the early morning, after a wakeful, restless night. Exciting scenes were evidently before his mind’s eye. The enemy was pressing him sorely. He was anxious as to his position. He gave orders rapidly and with vehemence. His subordinates seemed to be failing him. Everything was apparently wrong. Just then the young officer’s mother, who had come from the North to watch over him, entered the room where he lay. As the door opened for her coming, he turned toward it his troubled face, as if expecting a new enemy to confront him. Instantly, as he saw who was there, his countenance changed, the look of anxiety passed away, the eye softened, the struggle of doubt and fear was at an end, and with a deep-drawn sigh of relief he said in a tone of restful confidence, “Ah, mother’s come! It’s all right now!” And the troubled veteran soldier was a soothed child again.
Soldier, statesman, scholar, divine; every man is a child to his mother, to the last; and it is the best that is in a man that keeps him always in this child-likeness toward his loving mother. Were it not for the power of a mother’s love, that best and truest side of a man’s nature would never be developed, for the man’s good and for the mother’s reward. It costs something to be a good mother; but there is no reward which earth can give to be compared with that love which a faithful mother wins and holds from the son of her love. Oh! if good mothers could only know how much they are doing for their children by their patient, long-suffering, gentle ways with them, and how sure these children are to see and feel this by and by, the saddest of them would be less sad and more hopeful, while toiling and enduring so faithfully, with perhaps apparently so slight a return.
XXVIII.
_ALLOWING PLAY TO A CHILD’S IMAGINATION._
Imagination is a larger factor in the thoughts and feelings of a child than in the thoughts and feelings of an adult; and this truth needs to be recognized in all wise efforts at a child’s training. The mind of a child is full of images which the child knows to be unreal, but which are none the less vivid and impressive for being unreal. It is often right, therefore, to allow play to a child’s imagination, when it would not be right to permit the child to say, or to say to the child, that which is false.
A child who is hardly old enough to speak perceives the difference between fact and fancy, and is able to see that the unreal is not always the false. Hence a very young child can understand that to “make believe” to him is not to attempt to deceive him. A child in his mother’s lap, who is not yet old enough to stand alone, is ready to pull at a string fastened to a chair in front of his mother’s seat, and play that he is driving a horse. As he grows older, he will straddle a stick and call that riding horseback; telling his parent, perhaps, of the good long ride he is taking. Not only is it not a parent’s duty to tell that child that the chair or the stick is not a horse, but it would be unfair, as well as unkind, to insist on that child’s admission that his possession of a horse is only in his fancy.
The child is here not deceived to begin with; therefore, of course, he does not need to be undeceived. Yet it would be wrong for the parent to permit his child to say, as if in reality, that he had been taken out to ride by his father, when nothing of the kind had happened. In the latter case the statement would be a false one, while in the former case it would be only a stretch of fancy. The child as well as the parent would have no difficulty in recognizing the difference between the two statements.
A little girl will delight herself with setting a table with buttons for plates and cups, from which she will serve bread and cake and tea to her invited guests; and she will be lovingly grateful for her mother’s apparently hearty suggestion that “this tea is of a fine flavor,” when she would feel hurt if her mother were to tell her, coolly and cruelly, that it was only a dry button which had been passed as a cup of tea. The fancy in this case is truer by far than the fact. There is no deception in it; but there is in it the power of an ideal reality. And it is by the dolls and other playthings of childhood that some of the truest instincts of manhood and of womanhood are developed and cultivated in the progress of all right child-training.
It is in view of this distinction that the story of Santa Claus and Christmas Eve may be made one of reprehensible falsity, or one of allowable fancy. The underlying idea of Santa Claus is, that on the birth-night of the Holy Child Jesus there comes a messenger from him to bring good gifts to children. So far the idea is truth. Just how the messenger from Jesus comes, and just who he is, are matters in the realm of fancy. The child is entitled to know the truth, and is entitled also to indulge in a measure of fancy. For a parent to take a child, the night before, and show him all the Christmas gifts arranged in a drawer as preparatory to the stocking-filling, leaving no room for the sweet indulgings of fancy, would neither be wise nor be kind. It would not accord with the God-given needs of the child’s nature. Nor, again, would it be wise or kind for the parent to tell the full story of Santa Claus and his reindeers as if it were an absolute literal fact. Children have, indeed, been frightened by the belief that Santa Claus would come down the chimney at night, and would refuse them presents if they were awake at his coming; and this is all wrong. The child should be taught the truth as the truth, and indulged in the fancy as fancy.
It is, indeed, much the same in this realm as in the Bible realm. To say that Jesus is the Good Shepherd is to present a truth in the guise of fancy; and unless a child is helped to know the measure of truth and to perceive the sweep of fancy, there is a danger of trouble in using this Bible figure; for it is a fact that children have suffered from the thought that they were to be literal “lambs” in the Saviour’s fold. This recognition of the limits between the fanciful and the false needs to be borne in mind at every stage of a child’s training. The false is not to be tolerated. The fanciful is to be allowed a large place.
This truth applies also to the realm of fairy-tale reading. A child can read choice fairy tales, understanding that they are fanciful, with less danger to his mind and character than he would incur in the reading of a falsely colored religious story-book. In the one case he knows that the narration is wholly fanciful, while in the other case he is liable to be misled through the belief that what is both fictitious and false may have been a reality. Not the wholly fanciful, but the fictitiously false, in a child’s reading, is most likely to be a means of permanent harm to him.
A child’s imagination can safely be allowed large play, in his amusements, in his speech, and in his reading. He knows the difference between the fanciful and the false quite as well as his parents do. It is the line between the false and the real in moral fiction that he needs help in defining. It will be well for him if he has parents who understand that distinction, and who are ready to give him help accordingly.
XXIX.
_GIVING ADDED VALUE TO A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS._
Christmas is a day of days to the little folks, because of the gifts it brings to them. But Christmas gifts have a greater or a lesser value in the eyes of children according to the measure of the giver’s self which is given with them. It is not that children intelligently prize their gifts, as older persons are likely to, in proportion as they read in them the proofs of the giver’s loving labor in their preparation. But it is that to children the Christmas gifts by themselves are of minor value, in comparison with the interest excited in the manner of their giving, through labors that really represent the giver’s self, whether the children perceive this, at the time, or not.
The Christmas stocking and the Christmas tree give added value to the gifts that they cover; and neither tree nor stocking can be made ready for Christmas morning without patient and loving labor, on the part of the parents, during the night before. Moreover, beyond the dazzling attractions of the ornamented tree, and the suggestive outline of the bulging stocking, the more there is to provoke curiosity and to incite endeavor, on the children’s part, in the finding and securing of their Christmas portion, the better the children like it, and the more they value that which is thus made theirs.
It takes time and work and skill to make the most, for the children, of a Christmas morning; but it pays to do this for the darlings, while they still are children. They will never forget it; and it will be a precious memory to them all their life through. It is one of the child-training agencies which a parent ought to be glad to use for good.
One good man might be named who has brought to perfection the art of making Christmas delightful to children. He has no children of his own; so he makes it his mission to give happiness to other people’s children. The story of bright and varied Christmas methods in his home would fill a little volume. His plans for Christmas are never twice alike; hence the children whom he gathers say truly, “There was never anything like _this_ before.” Take a single Christmas for example. This child-lover was busy getting ready for it for weeks in advance. Money he spent freely, but he did not stop with that. Day and evening, with a loving sister’s help, he worked away getting everything just to his mind—which was sure to be just to the children’s mind. At last Christmas eve was here; so were the children—nieces and nephews, and others more remote of kin, gathered in his home to wait for the hoped-for day.
Christmas morning came at last. Waking and sleeping dreams had all been full of coming delights to the children; for they knew enough from the past to be sure that good was in store for them. No one overslept, that morning. According to orders, they gathered in the breakfast-room. Their stockings were hanging from the mantel, but limp and empty. Not one suspicious package or box was to be seen. Breakfast was first out of the way, that the morning might be free for a right good time. Then the day was fairly open. Each went to his or her stocking. There was nothing in it but a little card, pendent from a thread coming over the mantel edge. On that card was a rhyming call to follow the thread wherever it might lead; somewhat after this form:
“Charley, dear, if you’ll follow your nose, And your nose will follow this string Throughout the house, wherever it goes,— You will come to a pretty thing.”
Every stocking told the same story, in varied form, and every child stood holding a frail thread, wondering to what it would lead, and waiting the signal for a start. At the word, all were off together.
It was a rare old house, richly furnished with treasures of art and fancy from all the world over. The breakfast-room was heavily paneled in carved wood and hung with ancient Gobelin tapestry. The threads which the children followed passed back of the large Swiss clock, along the wall under the tapestry, out by the parlor with its Cordova-leather panels, into a picture-hung reception room, and there mounted to the ceiling above, up through a colored glass sky-light. When the children saw that, they scampered through the marble-tiled hall, up the broad polished walnut staircase to the passage above, and there drew up their threads, and started on a new hunt.
From this fresh point of departure the different threads took separate directions. They led hither and thither, the children following, almost holding their breaths with the excitement of pursuit and expectation. Along the corridor walls, under rows of Saracen tiles and Italian majolica and Sèvres porcelain, back of old paintings, through the well-filled library, into and out of closets stored with fishing-tackle and hunting-gear, through rooms spread with Turkish mats and rich with coverings of Persian embroidery, up into the third story, and down along the under side of the banister rail, back to the lower floor, again the threads led the way and the children followed. It was a happy hour for old and young.
By and by the threads came once more to a common point, passing under a closed door out of a rear hall, where a printed placard called on each child to wait until all were together. One by one they came up with beaming faces and bounding hearts. The door was opened. There in the center of the disclosed room were seven mammoth pasteboard Christmas boots, holding from one to three pecks each, marked with the names of the several children, and filled to overflowing. Each child seized a boot, and hurried, as directed, back to the breakfast-room.
Then came new surprises. All hands sat on the floor together. Only one package at a time was opened, that all might enjoy the disclosures to the full. And there were unlooked-for directions on many a package. One child would take a package from her Christmas boot, and, on removing the first wrapper, would find a written announcement that the package was to be handed over to her cousin. A little later, the cousin would be directed to pass along another package to a third one of the party. And so the morning went by. How happy those children were! What life-long memories of enjoyment were then made for them! And how thoroughly the good uncle and aunt enjoyed that morning with its happiness which they had created!
There were elegant and fitting presents found in those Christmas boots; but the charm of that day was in the mysteries of that pursuing chase all over that beautiful house, and in the excitements of prolonged anticipation and wonder. Those children will never have done enjoying that morning. The choicest gifts then received by them had an added value because their generous giver had put so much of himself into their preparation and distribution. And this is but an illustration of a truth that is applicable in the whole realm of efforts at gladdening the hearts of the little ones on Christmas or any other day. It matters not, so far, whether the home be one of abundance or of close limitations, whether the gifts be many or few, costly of inexpensive.
He who would make children happy must do for them and do with them, rather than merely give to them. He must give himself with his gifts, and thus imitate and illustrate, in a degree, the love of Him who gave himself to us, who is touched with the sense of our enjoyments as well as our needs, and who, with all that He gives us, holds out an expectation of some better thing in store for us: of that which passeth knowledge and understanding, but which shall fully satisfy our hopes and longings when at last we have it in possession.
XXX.
_GOOD-NIGHT WORDS._
If there is one time more than another when children ought to hear only loving words from their parents, and be helped to feel that theirs is a home of love and gladness, it is when they are going to bed at night. Good-night words to a child ought to be the best of words, as they are words of greatest potency. Yet not every parent realizes this important truth, nor does every child have the benefit of it.
The last waking thoughts of a child have a peculiar power over his mind and heart, and are influential in fixing his impressions and in shaping his character for all time. When he turns from play and playmates, and leaves the busy occupations of his little world, to lie down by himself to sleep, a child has a sense of loneliness and dependence which he does not feel at another time. Then he craves sympathy; he appreciates kindness; he is grieved by harshness or cold neglect.
How glad a true child is to kneel by his mother’s knee to pray his evening prayer, or to have his father kneel with him as he prays! How he enjoys words of approval or encouragement when they precede the good night kiss from either parent! With what warm and grateful affection his young heart glows as he feels the tender impress of his mother’s hand or lips upon his forehead before he drops asleep. How bright and dear to him that home seems at such an hour! How sorry he is for every word or act of unkindness which he then recalls from his conduct of the day! How ready he then is to confess his specific acts of misdoing, and all his remembered failures, and to make new resolves and purposes of better doing for the future!
Whatever else a child is impatient to grow away from, he does not readily outgrow the enjoyment of his mother’s good-night. As long as she is willing to visit his bedside, and give him a kiss, with a loving word, just before he goes to sleep, he is sure to count that privilege of his home as something above price, and without which he would have a sense of sad lack. And at no time is he more sure than then to be ready to do whatever his mother would ask of him; at no time do gentle, tender words of loving counsel from her sink deeper into his heart, or make an impression more abiding and influential.
There are young men and women, still at their childhood’s home, who look for their mother’s coming to give them her good-night kiss, with no less of interest and grateful affection than when they were little boys and girls. And there are many more people—both young and old—away from their homes, who thank God with all their hearts for the ineffaceable memories of such tokens of their dear mother’s love, while yet they were with her.
Notwithstanding this, however, there is perhaps no one thing in which parents generally are more liable to err than in impatient or unloving words to their children when the little ones are going to bed. The parents are tired, and their stock of patience is at the lowest. If the children are not as quiet and orderly and prompt as they should be, the parents rebuke them more sharply than they would for similar offenses earlier in the day. Too often children go to bed smarting under a sense of injustice from their parents, and brood over their troubles as they try to quiet themselves down to sleep. Their pillows are often wet with their tears of sorrow, and their little hearts are, perhaps, embittered and calloused through the abiding impressions of the wrong they have suffered, or the harshness they have experienced, while they were most susceptible to parental influences for good or ill.
It is a simple matter of fact that some parents actually postpone the punishment of their children for the misdeeds of the day until the leisure hour of twilight and bed-time. A great many mothers besides the “old woman who lived in a shoe,” in providing for a large family of children, have often “whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed.” Perhaps children, as a rule, receive more whippings at bed-time than at any other of the twenty-four hours. And unquestionably they then have more scoldings.
“Do you hear me, children?” sounds out the voice of many a mother into the nursery as the children are getting to bed. “If you don’t stop playing and talking, and go right to sleep, I’ll come up there and just _make_ you.” And that is the echo of that mother’s voice which rings longest in her children’s ears.
Again, there are mothers who, without any thought of unkindness, are unwise enough to deliberately refuse a good-night kiss to their children, as a penalty for some slight misconduct; not realizing the essential cruelty of withholding from the little ones this assurance of affection, at a time when the tender heart prizes it above all else. The first effect of such a course as this is to cause bitterness of grief to the children. The repetition of such a course is liable to loosen the parent’s loving hold on the little ones, and to diminish the value of the good-night kiss. It is, indeed, probably true, that more children out of reputable homes are soured, and estranged, and are turned astray, through harshness and injustice, or by unwise severity, at their bed-time hour, than from any other provoking cause in their home-life.
Even where there is no harshness of manner or severity of treatment on the part of the parents, there is often an unwise giving of prominence, just then, to a child’s faults and failures, so as to sadden and depress the child unduly, and to cast a shade over that hour which ought to be the most hopeful and restful of all the waking hours. Whatever is said by a parent in the line of instruction toward a better course, at such a time, should be in the way of holding up a standard to be reached out after, rather than of rebuking the child’s misdoings and shortcomings in the irrevocable past. The latest waking impressions of every day, on every child, ought to be impressions of peace and joy and holy hope.
A sensitive, timid little boy, long years ago, was accustomed to lie down to sleep in a low “trundle-bed,” which was rolled under his parents’ bed by day, and was brought out for his use by night. As he lay there by himself in the darkness, he could hear the voices of his parents, in their lighted sitting-room, across the hall-way, on the other side of the house. It seemed to him that his parents never slept; for he left them awake when he was put to bed at night, and he found them awake when he left his bed in the morning. So far this thought was a cause of cheer to him, as his mind was busy with imaginings in the weird darkness of his lonely room.
After loving good-night words and kisses had been given him by both his patents, and he had nestled down to rest, this little boy was accustomed, night after night, to rouse up once more, and to call out from his trundle-bed to his strong-armed father, in the room from which the light gleamed out, beyond the shadowy hall-way, “Are you there, papa?” And the answer would come back cheerily, “Yes, my child, I am here.” “You’ll take care of me to-night, papa; won’t you?” was then his question. “Yes, I’ll take care of you, my child,” was the comforting response. “Go to sleep now. Good-night.” And the little fellow would fall asleep restfully, in the thought of those assuring good-night words.
A little matter that was to the loving father; but it was a great matter to the sensitive son. It helped to shape the son’s life. It gave the father an added hold on him; and it opened up the way for his clearer understanding of his dependence on the loving watchfulness of the All-Father. And to this day when that son, himself a father and a grandfather, lies down to sleep at night, he is accustomed, out of the memories of that lesson of long ago, to look up through the shadows of his earthly sleeping-place into the far-off light of his Father’s presence, and to call out, in the same spirit of child-like trust and helplessness as so long ago, “Father, you’ll take care of me to-night; won’t you?” And he hears the assuring answer come back, “He that keepeth thee will not slumber. The Lord shall keep thee from all evil. He shall keep thy soul. Sleep, my child, in peace.” And so he realizes the twofold blessing of a father’s good-night words.