266 PLAIN FACTS FOR OLD AND YOUNG 



will enjoy it better than any other place. Cultivate 

 music; its mellowing, harmonizing, refining influence 

 is too great to be prudently withheld. Children natu- 

 rally love music; and if they cannot hear it at home, 

 they will go where they can hear it. Supply attractive 

 books of natural history, travels, interesting and in- 

 structive biographies, and almost any other books but 

 love-sick novels and sentimental religious story-books. 

 Guard against bad books and bad associates as care- 

 fully as though they were deadly serpents; for they 

 are, indeed, the artful emissaries of the ^*old serpent" 

 himself. A taste once formed for reading light liter- 

 ature destroys the relish for solid reading ; and usually 

 the taste, once lost, is never regained. The fascination 

 of bad companionship once formed around a person, 

 is broken with the greatest difficulty. Hence the neces- 

 sity of watching for the very beginnings of evil, and 

 promptly checking them. 



The mind should be thus fortified against the trifles 

 and follies of fashionable life. It should be elevated 

 into a sphere far above that occupied by those who pass 

 their time in fashionable drawing-rooms in silly twad- 

 dle, with thrumming a piano, with listless day-dream- 

 ing or in the gratification of perverted tastes and de- 

 praved instincts in any other of the ways common to 

 fashionable life. 



