if in the city, to the other end of the town. Two days in a month, or once in a year, you are again a father. Your son returns to you, but as a stranger, formed by another, and seeking under your roof only the pleasure of idleness, liberty, or comfort. His education finished, his passions, his pleasures, or his sports rob you of his society. The paternal mansion is a prison to him; you are his jailer, or, what is worse, his cashier. Without doubt he is touched by your reproaches, he is afflicted by the tears of his mother — but for an hour. He has the fever of life — he must live. Have you not lived, also?
A daughter, on the contrary, is yours, and yours only. Her heart will never forsake you, even when she becomes mistress of another household, for she leaves you only to become a mother in her turn, and, retracing then, as teacher, the steps she has taken as pupil, each one of her experiences in her new journey will be gratefully associated with her memories of you. At length old age comes upon you, and with it isolation, sadness, infirmities. Your son does not abandon you, but, borne along by the necessity of activity which lies at the foundation of the life of man, his visits are less frequent, his words are more brief; a man does not know how to console. Your daughter, on the contrary, be she maiden, wife, or widow, establishes herself by your pillow or behind your sick-chair, and leads the most skeptical to believe in Divinity by force of that good- ness which is truly Divine. Who has not encountered one of these Cordelias loieeling before a father whose reason totters or whose body decays? Ah! then the daughter be- comes the mother, and those tender and caressing intona- tions consecrated to children — those words which, it would seem, are peculiar to the lips of mothers — are bestowed with an ineffable grace; the old man recognizes this change
