The Beautiful and True in American Homes. 119 



fresh, free air from the mountain top, thus flinging down the 

 centuries the grieved undertone, which caight have risen to inter- 

 ludes of praise. We add acre to acre, and field to field for the 

 little ones in their cradles, when God knows it were better if some 

 of the unsanctified dollars were distributed in throwing a little of 

 heaven's sunshine and beauty into their lives. The acres thej 

 may gather themselves, if God gives them strength of hand and 

 heart, but a blighted childhood, who shall heal? 



Alihoagh not exactly under the head of the subject given us, 

 yet growing out of it, is the question of undeveloped talent in the 

 home. If among the little brood coming up around your hearth- 

 stones, one or two should be marked from their cradles with genius 

 or talent in some special line, do not try to curb or repress them ; do 

 not chalk out for them a straight and undeviating mark, and say to 

 them, " thus and thus shall you work." This bent of human souls is 

 a complicated and perplexing question ; how the young eaglet may 

 sometimes be hatched out in the nest of a ground bird, to the 

 utter astonishment and consternation of its simple parents. 

 Scientists tell us there is an hereditary law which rules all this. 

 We believe it is the " stamp of God " by which certain human 

 beings are set apart for certain work in his great harvest fields, 

 and that he will hold us responsible for the blighted talents of 

 our children which we have failed to unfold. What right has a 

 man, because he owns a paltry eighty acres of land, to say, "My 

 sons shall all be farmers ! " when perhaps the Creator has 

 designed one for the ministry, another for the mechanics, and a 

 third for the art?. We make but crooked business of it, trying 

 to alter the Lord's plans to suit ourselves. The father of one of 

 our Methodist Episcopal presiding elders, himself a Presbyterian 

 deacon of the strongest Calvinistic stripe, had the misfortune to 

 own a son the exact antipode ol himself. The boy was irrevoca- 

 bly and irredeemably an arUsl from his birth. The taste for 

 colors was deeply engrafted in his soul, though how the mistake 

 was made was one of Natures puzz'es, for his father's bent was 

 as straight and unwavering as one of his own stone fences. But 

 the son was an artist, and no help for it; probably the infection 

 had been taken from one of his progenitors, three or four genera- 



