Take these lines, reader, if you please, as an evidence of how the
memories growing out of the associations of boyhood's school-days
endure through life. This association of the sexes operates as a
restraint upon both, salutary to good conduct and good morals. Such
restraints are far more effective than the staid lessons of some old,
wrinkled duenna of a school-mistress, whose failure to find a
sweetheart in girlhood, or a husband in youthful womanhood, has soured
her toward every man, and filled her with hatred for the happiness she
witnesses in wedded life, and which is ever present all around her. Her
warnings are in violation of nature. She has forgotten she was ever
young or inspired with the feelings and hopes of youth. Men are
monsters, and marriage a hell upon earth. Girls will not believe this,
and will get married. How much better, then, that they should
cultivate, in association, the generous and natural feelings of the
heart, and during the period allotted by nature for the growth of the
feelings natural to the human bosom, as well as to the growth of the
person and mind, than to be told what they should be by one
disappointed of all the fruits of them, and hating the world because
she is! It is the mother who should form the sentiments and direct the
conduct of daughters, and in their teachings should never forget that
nature is teaching also.
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