Let sisters not begrudge the time and care bestowed on a brother. It
is hard to believe that any boy that you know so well as your brother
can ever turn out anything very useful. Well, he may not be a Moses.
There is only one of that kind needed for six thousand years. But I
tell you what your brother will be--either a blessing or a curse to
society, and a candidate for happiness or wretchedness. He will, like
Moses, have the choice between rubies and living coals, and your
influence will have much to do with his decision. He may not, like
Moses, be the deliverer of a nation, but he may, after your father and
mother are gone, be the deliverer of a household. What thousands of
homes to-day are piloted by brothers! There are properties now well
invested and yielding income for the support of sisters and younger
brothers, because the older brother rose to the leadership from the
day the father laid down to die. Whatever you do for your brother will
come back to you again. If you set him an ill-natured, censorious,
unaccommodating example, it will recoil upon you from his own
irritated and despoiled nature. If you, by patience with all his
infirmities and by nobility of character, dwell with him in the few
years of your companionship, you will have your counsels reflected
back upon you some day by his splendor of behavior in some crisis
where he would have failed but for you.