The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

646

THE BOY OF TO-DAY.

any more, or go into the kitchen to make pies. I love you
so much, mamma, that if papa hadn't married you, and
you'd waited till I'd growed up, I should have married you
myself." And when he had said that, he had made the
strongest declaration of love that his affectionate little heart
could frame.
When the boys of to-day, and of all time, are young,
they are largely in the hands of women, who have the fashioning and the shaping of them to a great extent. The
father's influence is more powerful later. It is a thousand
pities that mothers lose patience, at times, over the rough
and helter skelter ways of boys in early life. Do not confound disorderly habits with immorality. Do not say to
the lad " You are the worst boy I ever knew." Do not tell
him that "he makes more trouble than all his sisters put
together," and refrain from exhorting him to " go out doors
to play, and to stay there until he is called in." If you cannot train him to order while in your care, remember that
by and by he will enter some office, or engage in some business, where order is a necessity, and must be observed.
And if all other means shall prove ineffectual, some bright,
orderly girl will, in time, take him and his belongings into
her care, for love of him, who may transform him into an
orderly man, or -she may not. If she should fail, her
experience would not be a new one, by any means.
Every boy should be trained to respect womanhood, and
in our country this ought not to be difficult. For there are
no men so courteous to women as American men, and there
is no country in the world where women receive the kindness, courtesy, and attention that they do in America.
When I was in Berlin, at one time, I saw a husband and
wife start out together on some errand, or to engage in
some kind of work. The hands of both were filled with