The most astounding instance of _tact_, is to listen, inwardly crucified, with a pleased air, to an old--_old_ joke, and a poor one at that: to improvise a laugh at the proper moment, and successfully to resist the malicious instinct to flatter the narrator, at the close, by saying: "Yes, I have heard that before."
ANSWER YOUR CHILDREN'S QUESTIONS.--Education is erroneously supposed only to be had at schools. The most ignorant children often have been constant in their attendance there, and there have been very intelligent ones who never saw the inside of a school-room. The child who always asks an explanation of terms or phrases it cannot understand, who is never willing to repeat, parrot-like, that which is incomprehensible, will far outstrip in "education" the ordinary routine scholar. "Education" goes on with children at the fireside--on the street--at church--at play--everywhere. Do not refuse to answer their proper questions then. Do not check this natural intelligence, for which _books_ can never compensate, though you bestowed whole libraries.
"Poor Burns!" all exclaim after reading his life and his poems. Poor Burns! _I_ too say; and the next minute I ask, impatiently, why _he_, so conscious of his God-given powers, should have miserably shortened his life one-half by ill-governed appetites and excesses. Why, if coining his brain into dollars, for the widow and fatherless, proved impossible, he should become so disgusted with manual labor, that even his filial, fraternal, and conjugal love could not dignify its repulsive features, since it needs _must be_. Why, with a loving, prudent, industrious, faithful wife to help him, he could not emulate her everyday but sublime heroism, not by paroxysms of effort, only to show us how well he _might_ have done, but that steady, determined persistence which seldom fails of success. Why he, at once so great and so little, took pleasure and pride in wallowing in the mire, merely because strait-laced hypocrisy stepped daintily over it with white-sandalled feet. There was no greatness in this. It was but the angry kick of the impatient urchin upon the chair over which he had stumbled. Did his ambition to be written down a publican and a sinner lessen the ranks of the Pharisee? Could he look into the trusting faces of his innocent children, and feel no secret pang that for so petty and unworthy a motive he was content to hazard or forego their future respect? Had he none but himself to consult in such unworthy disposition of his time and talents? Was it _manly_ in the midst of that loving group coolly to look forward to the possibility of an old age of beggary, and toleration by chance firesides, in the undignified character of jester or clown? Because a man is a "genius," must one indorse these things and write them down as "eccentricities" inseparable from it and to be lightly passed over? Must intellect _necessarily_ be at variance with principle?