produce good fruit. Yet my reader will say that the best man he
ever knew, had the worst children he ever saw. The truth of the
statement is admitted, but what do you know of the home life of
that family? How much unreasonable restraint has been exercised
upon those children? From how many exhibitions of stern and
unrelenting injustice have these children suffered? What laxity of
discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that
family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but
who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are
pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained,
hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when
a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it
outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend
upon them, and work out their natural results in them.

It is astonishing to see how long a seed will lie in the ground
without germinating, and how true it will remain to its kind
through untold years. Cut down a pine forest, where an oak has not
been seen for a century, and oak shrubbery will spring up. Heave
out upon the surface a pile of earth that has lain hidden from the
eyes of a dozen generations, and forthwith it will grow green with
weeds. Plough up the prairie, and turn under the grass and flowers
that have grown there since the white settler can remember, and
there will spring from the inverted sod a strange growth that has
had no representative in the sunlight for long ages. Soul and soil
are alike in this. I once heard a man say of his father, who had
been dead many years--"I hate him: I hate his memory." The words
were spoken bitterly, with a flushed face and angry eyes, yet he
who spoke them was one of the kindest and most placable of men.
Deep down in his heart, under love for his mother which was almost