The Marietta Journal

BILL ARP ON OFFSPRING.

No man knows whether his offspring will be honest or not. Though I reckon a father is not to blame for being a father if he does his best to raise his children in the right way. Raising children is a good deal like raising horses, or cattle or anything else. There are ancestors away back on one side or the other, who had the devil in them, and sometimes that same devil will crop out and come to the surface in the third or fourth generation. The best men sometimes have the worst children, and it looks like the devil hankered after preacher's boys more than anybody else's and the Scriptures tell mighty bad things on some of the offspring of the prophets and patriarchs, like Samuel and David, and even old Father Adam, who didn't have any ancestors at all, raised up a very bad boy, and couldn't comfort himself by saying he was ruined by associating with the neighbor's children.

The late Lord Lytton was fond of relating a little anecdote as an illustration of one characteristic of high civilization. It was this: "Lord -, shortly after his marriage said to the author of 'Pelham.' 'My wife cannot be a leader of fashion.' 'Why not my Lord?' 'She has virtue, beauty, rank, fortune and establishment. You hit upon the very reason at first - she is virtuous. The lead in fashion is bestowed by the praises of certain fashionable men." To obtain these praises they must be earned. The givers must be admitted to familiarity, which, if it stop short of destruction, which it rarely does, must carry with it the reputation of vice. (God forbid my wife should be brought to this:- therefore she must be content to be classed with the hundred ruins.' I repeat the anecdote, for I consider its application better now than ever it was."