This picture is not overdrawn. I can produce you its counterparts any hour in the twenty-four. By and by, the oldest boy outgrows pinafores and jackets, and steps round in long-tails. No father has been at hand, to point out the quicksands he should have avoided, or to encourage him by his sympathy or love to do right. But the devil in all his Protean shapes _has_ been at his elbow, delighted at that father's indifference. Presently some wild oat sown, brings to that home, as yet _publicly_ undisgraced, its full-grown harvest of shame. _Now_ come storms of reproach, under which the loving mother weeps and cowers, as if _she_, God help her! were guilty. Alas! and alas! were such young wayward feet _ever_ turned right by such injudiciousness and injustice? Does not that boy _know_ that it is the disgrace alone that father feels, and not the shipwreck of his child's soul? Does that father say, even to himself, "Oh, Absalom! my son! my son!" Not at all: he feels only a blind rage, a vexatious thwarting and hindering of his own affairs, which _his son_ has brought about.
It is about the first time he ever regarded him in that relationship.
There is another kind of father and husband, quite the antipodes of this. _He_ devotes himself entirely to the domestic side of the question. He has no "business" to occupy him, nor does he desire to have. He loves his wife devotedly, and the more children he has the better he is pleased. Their mother and themselves are enveloped in a warm atmosphere of love. Never was a harsh, pettish, or fretful word heard from his amiable lips. He plays with the children all day; he fixes kites and balls without stint for them; he tends the baby; and when a crisis comes, and the maid-of-all-work disappears, discouraged at the eleventh baby, he washes the dishes, if need be, as serenely as if he were born to it. Meantime these really bright children, loving and loved, grow apace. The mother is growing old. Love is a good thing, but there is a far-off questioning look in her gentle eyes, vainly searching those children's future. _Her_ hands are now helplessly tied, and she sees no _outward_ tendency toward business in his. She "loves him"--how can she help it?--_thus far_; but the years move on so quickly, and her children grow so tall! She remembers sadly the advantages of education _she_ had, as she looks into the fair faces of her girls. Ah! how long will she continue to "love" their father? And how will those children, in after years, gauge that "love" which placed such obstacles between them and their best advancement? At what point in their young lives will they, chafing, let go the irresolute hand, that could only lead them up and down that narrow garden-path, when the broad highway of development lay in sight, and untrodden?