The cure is plain.  It needs no experiment to test it.  Merely to mention it ought to be enough.  If human beings are so awkward at this unhappy age, and so unhappy at this awkward age, simply because they do not know whether they are to be treated as children or as adults, suppose we make a rule that children are always to be treated, in point of courtesy, as if they were adults?  Then this awkward age—­this period of transition from an atmosphere of, to say the least, negative rudeness to one of gracious politeness—­disappears.  There cannot be a crisis of readjustment of social relations:  there is no possibility of such a feeling; it would be hard to explain to a young person what it meant.  Now and then we see a young man or young woman who has never known it.  They are usually only children, and are commonly spoken of as wonders.  I know such a boy to-day.  At seventeen he measures six feet in height; he has the feet and the hands of a still larger man; and he comes of a blood which had far more strength than grace.  But his manner is, and always has been, sweet, gentle, composed,—­the very ideal of grave, tender, frank young manhood.  People say, “How strange!  He never seemed to have any awkward age at all.”  It would have been stranger if he had.  Neither his father nor his mother ever departed for an instant, in their relations with him, from the laws of courtesy and kindliness of demeanor which governed their relations with others.

He knew but one atmosphere, and that a genial one, from his babyhood up; and in and of this atmosphere has grown up a sweet, strong, pure soul, for which the quiet, self-possessed manner is but the fitting garb.

This is part of the kingdom that cometh unobserved.  In this kingdom we are all to be kings and priests, if we choose; and all its ways are pleasantness.  But we are not ready for it till we have become peaceable and easy to be entreated, and have learned to understand why it was that one day, when Jesus called his disciples together, he set a little child in their midst.

A Day with a Courteous Mother.

During the whole of one of last summer’s hottest days I had the good fortune to be seated in a railway car near a mother and four children, whose relations with each other were so beautiful that the pleasure of watching them was quite enough to make one forget the discomforts of the journey.

It was plain that they were poor; their clothes were coarse and old, and had been made by inexperienced hands.  The mother’s bonnet alone would have been enough to have condemned the whole party on any of the world’s thoroughfares.  I remembered afterward, with shame, that I myself had smiled at the first sight of its antiquated ugliness; but her face was one which it gave you a sense of rest to look upon,—­it was so earnest, tender, true, and strong.  It had little comeliness of shape or color in it, it was thin, and pale; she was not young; she had worked hard; she had evidently been