Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1877 — “Never an Encouraging Word.” [ARTICLE]

“Never an Encouraging Word.”

“ He never speaks an encouraging word to us," said a servant of Mr. Towne. “Is that so?" “ You may try your life out to please him, and he never speaks an encouraging word. It is life under the harrow there, and I’ve left.” His children cannot leave home. He has two boys. They are sometimes at work in the garden, pulling up weeds, cutting the grass, making martin-houses and windmills. They put no heart in their work; it is dull and spiritless. They are forever haunted with a furtive fear. Try as they may, and try they do, their father never encourages them. Notning but a dismal drizzle of fault-finding ever falls from his lips. A sound scolding, a genuine cuffing when they deserve it—and children know they deserve it sometimes—like a thunderstorm, purify the air and make eveiything the better and brighter. Then the clouds clear away, and the gladdest sunshine follows. That is not Mr. Towne’s way. He is never thunder, and lightning and over it, not he; but perpetual drizzle, damp, dark, murky. Nothing pleases, nothing suits him. Putting his eye on his boy is a mark of illfavor. Every child dreads his gaze, shuns it, is ill at ease, awkward, squirming, until it wriggles out of the way and is gone. There are no glad voices in his presence; no outspoken, frank, honest utterance; only hesitation, inconsequence, self-contradiction. For fear always beclouds the brightest mind and the simplest heart. “There is no use telling it before father,” the boys say, in bringing home a bit of news or a tale of adventure. But, worst of all, “ There is no use in trying,” as they often say. And the disheartenment will presently merge into indifference, possibly something more active. They will run away. Evil “speaks pleasantly,” at least, and many a young person has turned from home and sought other companions for no other reason. Tho heart, with all its warm impulses, and with them its sense of shortcoming and incompleteness, needs enlargement—must have it in order to grow strong. “ Not one encouraging word from father!” Poor boys I Bridget can leave, they can’t. Nor can his wife leave. Poor woman 1 She is a brave woman, too. What a hopeful smile she often wears. It is because she will bear up; and smile she must, an answering smile to the love of friends, the courtesy of society, the beauty of flower and grass, and the slant sunshine through the trees. But there is no joy within. Home Is a joyless spot; for her most careful housewifery there is never an encouraging word; for the taste and grace witn which she tries to make home attractive there is never an encouraging word. The glance of her husband’s eye only takes in what happens to offend; the word of his mouth only expresses what be finds, and these are faults, spots, something forgotten or overlobked. Bhe dreads him, she fears him, she shrinks frem him. There is no freedom or sunshine in his presence. Perhaps in her yearning woman’s heart she has longed for his return, forgetting in his absence the small tyranny of his exacting spint; but the thrill of "his coming is soon deadened—“No encouraging words;” and she silently slips out of his sight to swallow her disappointment and heart-break-ing alone. There is a sense of misery in the house which no stranger can detect; perhaps this is too positively expressed; it is rather an absence of jov, everything spontaneous and cheerful and glad held in check. A minor tone runs through the family life, depressing to every one. Tho prints of an iron hand arc on every heart. “Never a word to encourage!” slipped unawares from her lips one day. It does not seem much; but who that has felt it does not know that it is the secret of many a jovless childhood, many a broken spirit.— Family Friend.