But, especially, said Charity, as your boys grew up--I think you said
that you had four boys and no girls?--well, then, all the more, as they
grew up, you should have taken occasion to talk to them about yourself.
Did your little boy never petition you for a story about yourself; and as
he grew up did you never confide to him what you have never confided to
his mother? Something, as I was saying, that made you sad when you were
a boy and a rising man, with a sadness your son can still see in you as
you talk to him. In conversations like that a boy finds out what a
friend he has in his father, and his father from that day has his best
friend in his son. And then as Matthew grew up and began to out-grow his
brothers and to form friendships out of doors, did you study to talk at
the proper time to him, and on subjects on which you never venture to
talk about to any other boy or man? You men, Charity went on to say,
live in a world of your own, and though we women are well out of it, yet
we cannot be wholly ignorant that it is there. And, we may well be
wrong, but we cannot but think that fathers, if not mothers, might safely
tell their men-children at least more than they do tell them of the sure
dangers that lie straight in their way, of the sorrow that men and women
bring on one another, and of what is the destruction of so many cities.
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