If you wish to cultivate a gossiping, meddling, censorious spirit in your children, be sure when they come home from church, a visit, or any other place where you do not accompany them, to ply them with questions concerning what everybody wore, how everybody looked, and what everybody said and did; and if you find anything in this to censure, always do it in their hearing. You may rest assured, if you pursue a course of this kind, they will not return to you unladen with intelligence; and rather than it should be uninteresting, they will by degrees learn to embellish, in such a manner as shall not fail to call forth remarks and expressions of wonder from you. You will, by this course, render the spirit of curiosity, which is so early visible in children and which, if tightly directed, may be made the instrument of enriching and enlarging their minds a vehicle of mischief which shall serve only to narrow them.