being sent to school under seven! The school sessions are on the old plan of six hours per day,—­from nine till twelve, and from one till four; but no learning of lessons out of school has been allowed.  Within the last year a system of free public schools has been introduced, “and the people are grumbling terribly about it,” said my informant.  “Why?” I asked; “because they do not wish to have their children educated?” “Oh, no,” said he; “because they do not like to pay the taxes!” “Alas!” I thought, “if it were only their silver which would be taxed!”

I must not be understood to argue from the health of the children of Nova Scotia, as contrasted with the lack of health among our children, that it is best to have no public schools; only that it is better to have no public schools than to have such public schools as are now killing off our children.

The registration system of Nova Scotia is as yet imperfectly carried out.  It is almost impossible to obtain exact returns from all parts of so thinly settled a country.  But such statistics as have been already established give sufficient food for reflection in this connection.  In Massachusetts more than two-fifths of all the children born die before they are twelve years old.  In Nova Scotia the proportion is less than one-third.  In Nova Scotia one out of every fifty-six lives to be over ninety years of age; and one-twelfth of the entire number of deaths is between the ages of eighty and ninety.  In Massachusetts one person out of one hundred and nine lives to be over ninety.

In Massachusetts the mortality from diseases of the brain and nervous system is eleven per cent.  In Nova Scotia it is only eight per cent.

The Republic of the Family.

“He is lover and friend and son, all in one,” said a friend, the other day, telling me of a dear boy who, out of his first earnings, had just sent to his mother a beautiful gift, costing much more than he could really afford for such a purpose.

That mother is the wisest, sweetest, most triumphant mother I have ever known.  I am restrained by feelings of deepest reverence for her from speaking, as I might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which her motherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for nearly twenty years, and made of her two sons “lovers and friends.”  I have always felt that she owed it to the world to impart to other mothers all that she could of her divine secret; to write out, even in detail, all the processes by which her boys have grown to be so strong, upright, loving, and manly.

But one of her first principles has so direct a bearing on the subject that I wish to speak of here that I venture to attempt an explanation of it.  She has told me that she never once, even in their childish days, took the ground that she had right to require any thing from them simply because she was their mother.  This is a position very startling to the average parent.  It is exactly counter to traditions.