The new parent's assistant / by Stephen Paget.

  • Stephen Paget
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The new parent's assistant / by Stephen Paget. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    next morning, he came to my bedroom, and said that he had been thinking it over carefully, and that he thought, on the whole, as I was so fond of music, that I had done right in going. I am not likely to forget him thus humbling himself to me. There is a similar story of Darwin : ‘ He had,’ says Sir Francis Darwin, ‘ a horror of drinking, and constantly warned his boys that anyone might be led into drinking too much. I remember, in my innocence as a small boy, asking him if he had ever been tipsy, and he answered very gravely that he was ashamed to say he had once drunk too much at Cambridge. I was much impressed, so that I know now the place where the question was asked.’ These are the impressions which endure, when other impressions, most deep for a time, have long faded off the surface of memory. Tell your children of their faults, and they will forget what you were saying ; tell them of your own, and they will remember the very place where you said it half a century ago. Besides, it is not as if we could hide our faults ; they stick out, most of them, like the broken ribs of an old umbrella. ‘The reference here is to the first chapter of The Little White Bird ’—‘ That strange short hour of the day, when every mother stands revealed before her little son.’ Against all these pages of good advice to parents, one objection makes itself heard, knocking persistently,
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