Next morning there were no languid eyes, pale cheeks.  Each little face was eager, bright, rosy, though the excited brain had had only five or six hours of sleep.

“If they only would feel tired the next day, that would be something of an argument to bring up with them,” said the poor mother.  “But they always declare that they feel better than ever.”

And so they do.  But the “better” is only a deceitful sham, kept up by excited and overwrought nerves,—­the same thing that we see over and over and over again in all lives which are temporarily kindled and stimulated by excitement of any kind.

This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing in all our mismanagements and perversions of the physical life of our children.  Their beautiful elasticity and strength rebound instantly to an apparently uninjured fulness; and so we go on, undermining, undermining at point after point, until suddenly some day there comes a tragedy, a catastrophe, for which we are as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, instead of to hasten it.  Who shall say when our boys die at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, our girls either in their girlhood or in the first strain of their womanhood,—­who shall say that they might not have passed safely through the dangers, had no vital force been unnecessarily wasted in their childhood, their infancy?

Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much investment of physical capital for years to come.  Every hour after dark that a child is awake is just so much capital withdrawn.  Every hour that a child lives a quiet, tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on hearths, squirrels in sunshine, is just so much investment in strength and steadiness and growth of the nervous system.  Every hour that a child lives a life of excited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a ball-room, is just so much taken away from the reserved force which enables nerves to triumph through the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of later life.  Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonable hours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matter how long it may be.  Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out that to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transform the apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey.  Who shall say that to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, an unwholesome supper of chicken salad and champagne may not leave as lasting effects on the constitution of a child?

If Nature would only “execute” her “sentences against evil works” more “speedily,” evil works would not so thrive.  The law of continuity is the hardest one for average men and women to comprehend,—­or, at any rate, to obey.  Seed-time and harvest in gardens and fields they have learned to understand and profit by.  When we learn, also, that in the precious lives of these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, and we must reap all which we do sow, and that the emptiness or the richness of the harvest is not so much for us as for them, one of the first among the many things which we shall reform will be “children’s parties.”