EVIL COMMUNICATIONS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 54, 25 April 1890, Page 29

EVIL COMMUNICATIONS.

A BEHA.RKABUB illustration of the fact that evil communications corrupt good manners has recently been borne in upon me, writes the Chicago Journal side-walk stroller. For the last fonr or five

months I have been on terms of intimate friendship with a very attractive young woman, who is nearly two years old. She only uses 'Afjfew words, but she uses them frequently, and she adds about twenty ■words a day to her vocabulary. For tbe first two months of our 'acquaintance I never knew her to cry or make a loud noise, although she was teething, sad — for part of the time — suffering from whooping cough. When she got angry, instead of yelling, she just put her thumb in her mouth and took it over along with her into the corner, where she contemplated the carpet or the ceiling until her wrath had subsided. Upon such occasions she had to do without whatever she wanted. But a change came over the spirit of the scene. One day her cousin, a boy aged four years, was brought up from the country to spend the winter with little Julia's mother. He is one of the boys who, when he sees anything, take 3 it, and when be doesn't see it asks for it, and whan he doesn't get it, just hollers like all the sea lions, bears and tigers in Lincoln Park. He is a howler from Howlersville, and invariably gets whatever he wants in double-quick time. He has a buzz-saw voice, and he makes the most of it. When he yells he drowns the sound of the cable-car, which runs before the dining-room window, and he is yelling from sunrise to sunset. Julia was much struck with the incomparable efficiency of her cousin's methods of transacting business, and the day after his arrival entered into partnership and adopted bis system in full. Julia never goes to the corner now when she is angry— with or without her thumb. She just catches her doll by the leg and banga its bead against tho glass of the book-caße, and howls until the saw-dust begins to flow. She stamps both feet and bangs around everything she can lay hold of on the table. During all her waking hours she and her cousin are fighting like demons. The house is uninhabitable, and soon the whole block will be vacant. Julia, probably, has had her temper spoiled for life. And all this because two mothers— who are among the best women in the world — have no more idea of how to educate children th%n they have of the integral calculus. Yet they are supposed to be doing their duty to society by raising two more torments for the human race.