influenced by regard to the wills of living persons, they are doing
very wrong and must expect to be sufferers in the end; nevertheless,
the powers of will-dangling and will-shaking are so liable to abuse
and are continually made so great an engine of torture that I would
pass a law, if I could, to incapacitate any man from making a will for
three months from the date of each offence in either of the above
respects and let the bench of magistrates or judge, before whom he has
been convicted, dispose of his property as they shall think right
and reasonable if he dies during the time that his willmaking power is
suspended.

  Mr. Pontifex would have the boys into the dining-room. "My dear
John, my dear Theobald," he would say, "look at me. I began life
with nothing but the clothes with which my father and mother sent me
up to London. My father gave me ten shillings and my mother five for
pocket-money and I thought them munificent. I never asked my father
for a shilling in the whole course of my Life, nor took aught from him
beyond the small sum he used to allow me monthly till I was in receipt
of a salary. I made my own way and I shall expect my sons to do the
same. Pray don't take it into your heads that I am going to wear my
life out making money that my sons may spend it for me. If you want
money you must make it for yourselves as I did, for I give you my word
I will not leave a penny to either of you unless you show that you
deserve it. Young people seem nowadays to expect all kinds of luxuries
and indulgences which were never heard of when I was a boy. Why, my
father was a common carpenter, and here you are both of you at
public schools, costing me ever so many hundreds a year, while I at
your age was plodding away behind a desk in my Uncle Fairlie's
counting house. What should I not have done if I had had one-half of
your advantages? You should become dukes or found new empires in
undiscovered countries, and even then I doubt whether you would have
done proportionately so much as I have done. No, no, I shall see you
through school and college and then, if you please, you will make your
own way in the world."

  In this manner he would work himself up into such a state of
virtuous indignation that he would sometimes thrash the boys then
and there upon some pretext invented at the moment.

  And yet, as children went, the young Pontifexes were fortunate;
there would be ten families of young people worse off for one
better; they ate and drank good wholesome food, slept in comfortable
beds, had the best doctors to attend them when they were ill and the
best education that could be had for money. The want of fresh air does
not seem much to affect the happiness of children in a London alley:
the greater part of them sing and play as though they were on a moor
in Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not
commonly recognised by children who have never known it. Young
people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting
themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy- very unhappy-
it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it
out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than
their own sinfulness.

  To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your
children that they are very naughty- much naughtier than most
children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of
perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their
own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they
cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable
you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they
will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you
are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you
represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward
you are, nor how soon you will run away, if they fight you with
persistency and judgement. You keep the dice and throw them both for
your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily
manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how
singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you
conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all,
but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children
rather than anyone else's. Say that you have their highest interests
at stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself
unpleasant by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these highest
interests. Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle as
the late Bishop of Winchester's Sunday stories. You hold all the trump
cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with
anything like judgement you will find yourselves heads of happy,
united, God-fearing families, even as did my old friend Mr.
Pontifex. True, your children will probably find out all about it some
day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or
inconvenience to yourself.

  Some satirists have complained of life, inasmuch as all the
pleasures belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle
till we are left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.

  To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-
delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very
rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting
east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and
what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the
age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said
he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was,
but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between
fifty-five and seventy-five, and Dr. Johnson placed the pleasures of
old age far higher than those of youth. True, in old age we live under
under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend
at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being
rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who