Stepping Stones to Happiness: Third Index Page

A Well-Spring of Joy. But one house will be only half peopled if there comes there no new life in the little child to carry on and enlarge the old.  

      When the first whisper comes to the young mother's heart which calls to her, "Blessed art thou among women," which tells her that the strength of  her love has kindled a new being, it is not of the great gulf of death that she must cross to win her treasure that most she thinks, but of the field of her past years, and of the influences that have made her what she is for good or ill.

"There are two moments in a diver's life:

One, when a beggar he prepares to plunge,

One, when a prince he rises with his pearl,"

she may perchance repeat, but not until she rises with her pearl from the black depths into which she plunged more bravely than any man ever went to battle, not until that most awful of all moments when she has felt the presence of the Lord of Life beside her, not until that sweetest of all moments when the little face lies near her own, when her tired arms clasp that which yesterday was not and today is, does she penetrate the secret and burden of those past years to its full meaning, and in the cup of her joy find a bitter tang, the sting of her own sins and errors, the effect of which the silent work of nature has passed over to her child, and made him in great degree that which she has made herself. Every mother knows something of the bitterness of this regret, unless she be immeasurably centered in the sphere of her own self-conceit; and from tha instant of the experience her life is bent toward undoing any evil the child may have inherited from her or from another, and toward bringing all good influences to bear in developing his being symmetrically and in making him a blessing to his race, something lovely in the Eternal eyes, it may be, something worthy of the full receipt of that life

which is love. She may be the sternest disbeliever in religious doctrine and dogma, finding no satisfaction to reason in the substance of any creed, but in this moment a sterner doubt will possess her: the dcubt if this little spirit can be anything less than immortal; and she finds herself proceeding on that supposition, and, in the peradventure, doing her best to give him a good start in immortality. When those die whom, living, we adored, it seems blasphemy to them to doubt of their continued existence ; when those are born of our love, as we know that love is everlasting we are assured that they partake of the nature of that which gave them existence.
      As the mother lies quiescent in the long days, in the still watches of the night, more often than otherwise her mind is busy with the great verities; she is rehearsing the child's future for him; she is weighing and judging his possibilities; she is thinking how this one fault that is his father's may be brought to naught in him, those noble qualities be brought to light, how those boundless faults that are her own may be exterminated or rendered abortive, how the moral and spiritual inheritances from his ancestry may be handled, how best shall be developed this last flower o:* the race. She sees that growth is the unfolding of life; that ^here is in it something of the divine; that it must not be hindered; and that possibly all she may be able to do is to keep off injurious influence.

      If she never prayed before, she prays now; if she never suffered before, she suffers now ; if she was never glad before, she is glad now; glad with a sweet awe that she and the Eternal Powers of goodness are to work together in making this child worthy not only of his mortal, but also of his immortal, parentage.

• The Baby
• The Physical Care of the Baby
• The Moral Growth of the Child
• Help in the Problem from the Great Educator
• Froebel
• The Kindergarten
• The Gifts in Froebel's System
•  School Another World
• In Visiting a Kindergarten
• John Wesley's Mother
• Slojd
• At The Hurricane Light 

Other Children. It is not all children that are reared in the love lines of the kindergarten methods, or in any other method that makes them a blessing to themselves or to the community. Often circumstances master the parents, and the children shift for themselves and are in reality reared by their hereditary traits; and sometimes when the young mother has little knowledge or skill and no assistance, and proceeds with the old fear of sparing the rod, she is halt beside herself by reason of the development of those traits before her eyes, and finds that, labor as she may to bring about happiness in her home, the very things that should make for happiness, the children, themselves, are growing up to precisely an opposite result. But since it has been discovered that homesickness is a disease, that laziness also is a disease, apt to be incurable that an inclination to petty thefts of things not wanted, and sometimes thrown away at once, is a mania, often inherited, and no more within the power of the patient to control than any more violent mania is it is to be imagined that many other emotional matters may come under the same head, and gradually reach a similar classification as ailments to be medicined rather than wickednesses to be punished.

• Medicine Rather Than Punishment
• Heredity
• Sparing the Rod
• Loving Children
• They Who Really Love Children
• Troublesome Children
• The Guest with Children
• Keeping Silence
• Amusing the Small People
• With Pencil and Paper
• A New Game
• Another Game
• The Story of Laddy's Burglar

Angels Unawares. No house or home is quite complete when everything has been done without that presence in it which redeems the too sordid pursuit of present opportunities by the tender touch of the things of the past. " What is home without a mother ? " the street ballad has it, but just as true and forcible a phrase would be, "What is home without a grandmother J" Whether it is the brisk and bustling grandmother whose years set lightly, and who is more useful than any brownie in the house, or the dear old saint whose work is done and who can only sit with folded hands and show us how near heaven is to earth, it is the grandmother that is the real angel in the house, and every child of the family thinks so.

• What a Boy Thought of His Grandmother
• Old Age
• Growing Old Gracefully
• The Satisfactions of Age
• The Refinement of Old Age
• The Term "Lady"
• Ailments in the Family
• The Right Sleep
• The Grandmother's Chair
• Delight in Poetry
• A Perpetual Thanksgiving

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