One such incident is sufficient to show the immense influence which an
elder brother or sister may have, for weal or for woe, over the younger
children. The smothered falsehood, the petty theft, the robbing of a
bird's-nest, the incipient oath, the first intoxicating draught, the
making light of serious things, with the repeated injunction--"Don't
tell mother!" may foster in a younger brother the germ of evil
propensities, and lead on till some fatal crime is the result.

When I was nine years old a letter was received by my father, the
contents of which set us children in an uproar of joy. It was from our
father's elder brother, who resided in a city seventy miles distant from
our country residence. This letter stated if all was favorable we might
expect all his family to become our guests on the following week, our
aunt and cousins to remain in our family some length of time, and be
subjected to the trial of inoculation from that dreaded
disease--small-pox. We were all on tip-toe to welcome our friends, and
especially our uncle, who from time to time had supplied us with many
rare books, so that we had now quite a valuable library of our own. All
our own family of children were at the same time put into the hospital.
I shall never forget "O dear," "O dear, I have got the symptoms, I have
got the symptoms!" that went around among us children.

I cannot but take occasion to offer a grateful tribute of thankfulness
that we are not now required by law, as then, to subject our children to
such an ordeal and to such strict regimen. Who ever after entirely
recovered from a dread of "hasty pudding and molasses" without salt?

When all was safely over, and my uncle came to take his family home,
there seemed to have been added a new tie of affection by this recent
intimacy, and it was agreed that my uncle's eldest son, a year or two