WEDDED LIFE

You are my true and wedded wife; As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart.—Shakspeare.

She's adorned Amply that in her husband's eye looks lovely— The truest mirror that an honest wife Can see her beauty in.—John Tobin.

"Of all the actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people," says Selden, "yet, of all actions of our life, it is most meddled with by other people." In fact, if people would take home their attention thus so liberally bestowed abroad, it would enable them to make matches of their own far better than those which now burden the records of the churches and the courts. If a young man and a young woman can be left alone three or four years, to wear into the new relations they have assumed, there is little chance of their being unhappily married. An instinct of the strongest character brought them together, and is likely to hold them by its own force. Man is a creature of habit. Strip him of his home after he has been for four years habituated to it, and he will be unhappy, no matter how unpeaceful that home may have been. Therefore, if possible, have your wife and yourself in a house by yourselves for the first four years of your married life. As a general thing this is possible, and I think a firm will, in most cases, greatly aids the possibility of such a course. One thing, at least, is clear,

NO HUSBAND IS DOING RIGHT

to admit to his home as a sharer of its comforts any other man. It is a common sentiment among any two homeless young men that the first one who marries shall take the other to live with him. Nothing is more absurd or out of place. I do not think there could be so dangerous a foe to the peace of the wife, in case the young man do not think his friend has married wisely,—and he must think so, or he would himself have married her if he could have done so. His criticisms will estrange the husband's heart and cool his love. On the other hand, if he has admired the lady, then the situation is all the more atrocious.

THOSE HORRIBLE EVENTS IN LIFE,

where a man's home is transformed suddenly into what has been bitterly but justly termed a "hell on earth," are more than half the time traceable to the carelessness of the husband in not throwing around his wife those barriers which shall ever keep her from temptation. The wife of pure instincts will generally object to the admission of another man to her home as a member of it. How often her womanly and honorable objection is overruled by the husband as the mark of an inhospitable nature. Live alone. Let no one see your meannesses, for the third party will remember and recite those meannesses where you would either never have seen them, or have forgotten them altogether.

BE KIND TO YOUR WIFE.

If you find this difficult, begin by making up your mind that, during the next week, you will not, under any circumstances whatever, speak a cross word to her. Carry out this resolution as well as you can. Then the next week takes off the strain. The natural tendency of cross words to misery will so startle you that you will soon try it for another week. You will do better on the second trial. This is important for your own peace of mind, for, in scolding and fretting, the average woman, if you get her started, can easily hold her own. This woman is bound to you by stronger ties than you suppose.

GO OFF TWO HUNDRED MILES AND SEE!

She is also bound to you by very strong bonds in the law, as you would find out if you deserted her. She is also entitled to a very high place in your goings and comings, as society teaches you. When the President is inaugurated, there is a front seat close by for his wife. The Chief Justice administers the oath, and there is another front seat for his wife, also. So you need not be afraid of doing her too much honor. Speak to her respectfully. Perhaps there is a youngster watching you—you have no idea how closely. This youngster will try on his hand governing his mother, if he sees any opportunity whatsoever. Just look to it that he does not see such an opening! Your wife as you will know, has cares of a multifarious kind. Her hours of labor greatly exceed yours, though she cannot concentrate her mind on one thing as you can. She is fitted, by long years of inherited housewifery, to do this and then that with untiring devotion to the interests of her household. You cannot, as a general thing, lighten those legitimate cares save by your smiles. But you are a selfish man if you increase them by requiring any great amount of extra personal attention. You will find it her nature to minister to you in many ways. Let her alone in it. Accept all gratefully, and do something in return

BY WAY OF FORMAL RECEIPT.

You will grow happier day by day, and your wife will be the happiest woman in the neighborhood. She will be proud of you because you have had the brains to be happy and sensible. We hear a good deal of railing against the general wisdom of getting married. There seems to be a sort of popular contagion lately, making it fashionable to fling jeers and jibes at the cares and sorrows of marriage. We find young men writing to the newspapers that it costs them six dollars to board singly, and that the same "style" of living and enjoyment could not be purchased at

A "BOARDING-HOUSE OF ONE'S OWN"

for less than twenty-two. And again the same sort of writer will assert that he can quit one "boarding-house" when he pleases, whereas he must eat the cold roast beef and cranberry sauce of the other until he crosses the creek called Styx. Let me call this young man Mr. Bachelor, and reply to him in about his own style:

A FEW THOUGHTS IN GENERAL:

1. A man named Payne wrote a seemingly-ordinary song entitled "Home, Sweet Home." This piece, on account of certain sentiments conveyed, at once received the seal of nearly universal approbation. It is safe to say Mr. Bachelor and the class in which he may be placed were not among those who accorded extraordinary attention to the little song. He is and they are, therefore, at once separated from the vast mass of the people. Evidently the sentiments of the song were based on experiences largely known to the general gender and unknown to Mr. Bachelor.

2. The man Daniel McFarland was so worthless that his wife refused to live with him, and, sadly enough, fell in love with still another man. The worthless husband, discovering that Richardson was coming into property which had not always been his own, resorted to an ambuscade, and killed Richardson. To the dullest comprehension this act revealed a deep jealousy. Jealousy is founded on a solid fear of losing something. In this unhappy family, where the man believed he had nothing to care for, he suddenly awoke to find he had thrown away a pearl richer than all his tribe.

3. It seems to me as natural for a man to establish a home, with a wife, as to grow a beard on his face.

SOME CONSIDERATIONS IN PARTICULAR.

1. At twenty-seven years of age a man whom I know met the finest young woman he had ever seen. He wanted her and he got her. Five years have passed.

2. At marriage the man found himself endowed with a godlike selfishness. This he probably owed to the past struggle for existence. With this not very estimable faculty he carried to his home a young woman endowed with nearly the opposite faculties. She only acquired selfishness through association with her companion. At the start, then, they were both willin' oxen—one ox was willing to do all the pulling, and the other ox was willing he should.

3. Now the man had also a high faculty called judgment. He continually wondered why the woman did not despise him on account of his selfishness. He soon discovered that it was because the woman lacked sadly in judgment. The baby would lift up its voice in the night. That baby must be attended to. The weather might be very cold. The man despised that fact, but the woman, because it made her teeth ache and her body cake and cramp, feared the cold. But the man also despised the baby and all its appertainings—particularly the appertainings. Therefore, the man debated within himself that he was very selfish, or he would get up. Perhaps, being a "just" man, the way men go, he really got up about once in a dozen times, but, candidly, he would probably have seen that baby suffer ere he would have attended its wants any oftener. The woman took it for granted that the man would not get up, and yet she did not despise him. She did not have judgment enough to do it.

VANITY AND SELFISHNESS.

4. A man's vanity and selfishness are present (to a woman's perception) in every movement. She likes them. They are the characteristics of masculinity.

5. The man entered matrimony with all the trepidation born out of thinking too much about it. It seemed to him like buying a fifteen-thousand-dollar horse on instalments. This is just as it seems to Mr. Bachelor, too. It was a pretty good price, but it was a high-stepper, a flyer, a beauty. It would take him all his life to pay for it, and it might founder the first year. But he had never in his life wanted anything the way he wanted that woman. Mr. Bachelor has not yet got to that stage.

RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL.

6. There is little doubt that, speaking of man as an animal, unchastened by the benign influence of religion, "the male hates the sick female." The female knows that. Yet in return she exhibits toward the sick male a tenderness that makes his hair stand on end when he thinks of his own short-comings.

7. The man's astonishment at reaching thirty was tremendous. He found he was changing, and that marriage was evidently

THE EXPRESS PREPARATION FOR THIS CONTINGENCY.

He used to go to the theatre a great deal. He did not then notice that the air in the auditorium was more rotten than the midnight winds that blow over Chicago from the industrious rendering-houses on her outskirts. It is now a real hardship to go to an ordinary dramatic performance, and he thinks theatre-goers are as a class the most discontented people there are in society. He used to spend his earnings in various other places which now weary him beyond measure, and are equally wearisome to those bachelor friends of his who used to keep him company, and are forced by single life, to still frequent such resorts.

THIS HE FINDS OUT

when his wife goes into the country for a week or two. Those two weeks are never halcyon days with him. There is a smell about a restaurant that eloquently pleads the sweetness of home, and there is a lack of confidence expressed in a pewter spoon and a general disinclination to believe that anyone is careful molded in with the thickness of the teacup, which startle him at once into a better conception of his wife's confidence in him.

8. My friend comes home and finds his dressing-gown and slippers in front of the fire. He is tired and cross, and doesn't want to sling ashes nor bang a coal-hod. But the sight of the fire makes him feel better at once, and if there be no fire, there are no ashes. He sits in front of a coke fire in a grate. His little girl brings his slippers and carries off his shoes—or carries off one shoe and one slipper. Then he falls to thinking that girls are poor property as compared with boys, but that any kind of children are a pretty good investment against one's old age. His increasing wonder is that the whole state of things is so natural. His wife takes comfort in having him in the same room with her. When he is reading and she is darning socks, she is the very embodiment of the fine French expression "I am content." She is not as beautiful as she once was. But

ALL THE ELEMENTS OF HER BEAUTY

are still present, and with a return of the flesh she has lost in hard work she will have all her looks. A handsome woman is just as handsome to a man as a handsome girl is to a green young man like Mr. Bachelor. My friend is hugging the shores of personal expense very closely for the purpose of having two weeks in the country with his wife during the heat of July. This woman's face does not intoxicate him as it once unquestionably did. Neither does the "Trovatore miserere," nor the "William Tell" or "Poet and Peasant" overtures so delight him as once upon a time. Nevertheless there is in him a secret joy of possession, calm and pleasant, in contemplating the wife, and a quiet satisfaction, in hearing the music, that the taste of his youth was so thoroughly good.

A WIFE'S PRAYER.

9. When his wife goes to bed she loves to put her head on her husband's knees to say her prayers, and he loves to have her. He has great confidence in a woman's prayers, and he is disposed, selfishly but correctly, to believe the supplication is nearly dual in its character. In his speech he treats his wife as though she were the wife of an honored friend. If he talked either loosely or coarsely to his wife he might fall in love with any woman to whom he showed greater respect. He would, beside, proclaim his folly, for woman has small sense of humor.

DEATH OR WORSE.

10. If my friend were suddenly to lose this home by the death of the wife, he would receive an unmeasured sympathy from all thoughtful men not included in the small class who never understood what there was in "Home, Sweet Home," to set people to humming it. If he were to have this wrenched from him by a sudden awakening of his wife to all his faults, and as blind an infatuation with the faults of another man as was once extended to his own, he would know just how Daniel McFarland felt. My friend is induced to believe, however, that his wife will be strongly under his influence so long as he does not inspire her with fear. He will not pound her unless he falls to whisky-guzzling, which, considering that he does not yet use tobacco, is impossible.

SO MUCH OF A PARTICULAR HOME.

By the study of other women than his own wife (which is a very unjust mode of study) man learns to hate women in general. By observing his wife, however, he is inclined to love all her sex. Again, by contemplating himself he falls into detestation of all humankind. Such "men" as young Mr. Bachelor have spent their time in exhaustive subjective researches. They know themselves too well. They should, in reforming, take an easy step upward, and, by contemplating the good points of Swift's Yahoos, somewhat elevate their opinion of the species which they so graciously ornament! A green old age is universally admired. The color of greenness at thirty, however, is not fashionable. If I have lacked in charity in defending the wisdom of married life, it is because I have seen too much grass thrown at bad boys. When you hear a fool prating of the misery of married men as compared with single men, answer him according to his folly, or, perhaps better, answer him not at all.



BACHELORS.

I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumspection and confine, For the sea's worth.—Shakspeare.

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.—Shakspeare.

Nothing is further from the single man's thoughts than that he will continue in the single state all his life. He expects, when the young woman meets his gaze who satisfies either his esthetic or pecuniary ideas, generally the latter, or both, to take that young woman to his bosom and begin married life. This is a natural state of mind, and there is no harm in indulging it. It shall be the object of a few of these pages to present such aspects of the unmarried state of man as have principally commended themselves to general attention. The bachelor has plenty of arguments to keep him single while he is not in love. He thinks the arguments keep him single, good fellow. He says, as I heard one of them say: "I would ask the unbiased observer what there is in the world, after all, to induce a man to commit matrimony. Some one will say: 'To have some one to care for him when sick.' This is complimentary to woman—indicating that she marries to become a nurser of the sick and old. And must a man endure all the pains and throes of years of matrimonial cyclones that he may have some one to stew his gruel during the brief space of his last illness? If a bachelor have money, he will have friends to care for him, no fear, and if he be poor, a wife is the last thing in the world he needs. She divides his pleasures and doubles his sorrows.

HE MUST DANCE TO FASHION'S TUNE—

a palatial residence, a corps of servants, a livery, and dresses from Paris—for the sake of having some one to receive and entertain his friends' wives. He must support his wife's relations, and endure no end of feminine abuse, which is not always so feminine. The world is divided into two classes: Those who are unmarried, but wish they were, and those who are married, but wish they were not."

THIS IS A FAIR SPECIMEN

of the argument by which the bachelor convinces himself that he is happy. If it does contribute to his peace of mind, why should the world care? And the world really does not care. When he comes to have his gruel stewed for him in a hospital, or, worse yet, a boarding-house, he finds out, all of a sudden, that he is really in the way, and that, in his life of perfect selfishness, he has never secured that thing which cannot be bought, yet which he so yearns for now in the hour of his feebleness, a woman's love. A good long sickness has greatly enlarged many a man's philosophy!

Still, it is not in the destiny of every man to have a wife, or to keep her if he get one. It is not unwise, therefore to consider that state as one of the phases of life, and to contemplate its various aspects, good and bad, as we have the other conditions of existence. "A man unattached and without wife," says Bruyere, "if he have any genius at all, may raise himself above his original position, may mingle with the world of fashion, and hold himself on a level with the highest; this is less easy for him who is engaged; it seems as if marriage put the whole world in their proper rank." "I have" says Burton, the melancholy, "no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for, and am a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures."

THE ONE GRAND RESULT OF SINGLE LIFE,

so far as is generally noticeable, is selfishness. The chief lesson of marriage is self-denial. Which is the more pleasing of the two traits? When the bachelor views life, he sees nothing good in it, for it all looks selfish. Being so deeply jaundiced, the eye tints everything with yellow. At forty he is heartily sick of it all. Why? Because he has learned that he has squeezed the orange dry. The faculties which God gave him to be pleased with when a recipient have been worked to death.

HE HAS BEEN A RECIPIENT WITHOUT CEASE.

He has chewed on one side of his mouth all his life. The teeth on the other side have loosened and are ready to fall out, while the overworked molars on the other are about to run into decay. The faculties whereby he was expected to please other people have become rudimentary, and he can now no more fascinate other people than he can sing soprano. He makes an effort to engage the interest of a young lady. The hollowness of his attack at once arrests her attention. The ease with which he speaks long sentences of admiration proclaims his long practice in the art, and the utter lack of real meaning in them. He knows that the girl will

LAUGH BEHIND HIS BACK,

and it irritates him, and disposes him to attribute her act to "the falseness of her sex," when it is merely her keen intelligence in such matters. The fact of the matter is, that though an old bachelor is seemingly greatly smitten with nearly every young girl he sees, he does not succeed in marrying because he is a hard man to catch. The young woman takes his measurement. His devotion is overpowering, but she easily sees that it is a sham. The bachelor looks at her glove, and, instead of admiring the hand, as the "marrying young man" does, he says "Dollar and a half!"

HE LOOKS INTO HER EYES AND FIGURES

on the probable cost of board for two. The time of mating is past with him, and that young woman can see it "as quick as a flash of lightning." He may be the man she could love if she "let go of herself," but his slippery words do not mean "marry," and she "passes him around." He loves to go to picnics and church sociables, for he must be amused, and he hopes to find that pleasure in next Tuesday's donation party which he did not get at last Friday's rehearsal.

THE TROUBLE ALL LIES

in his intense love of self. Society in general regards him as useful, and pities him. The older women generally suppose he would marry the first girl who would have him, and he himself hopes to sooner or later to come across a lady who is superior to all others, and who has money enough to pay her share of the expense of living. I wish him success, for

HE IS GENERALLY A GOOD FELLOW,

and strictly a creature of circumstances. If we catch the small-pox nothing is surer than that we will have it in spite of our pride. If a man is cast into a mold of events where he is bound to be taught nothing but selfishness, and to see nothing but the selfishness of others, the wonder is that he will assume, in the matter of self-denial, those relations, even for a day, which he so assiduously avoids for life.

SCHOLASTIC OPPORTUNITIES.

The single man has a fine chance to be "a scholar and a ripe good one." Having been denied the joys of a household all dependent on him, he may surround himself with books, he may pursue investigations, he may gather the ideas of the wits and the thinkers, and he may thus broaden his brains until he is the honored associate of the best minds in his region. This form of happiness is, to those who are within reach of it, one of the most satisfying within the gift of God. There is no reaction, there is no sorrow.

MAN LIVES TO LEARN,

after all. If the mind goes on in the culture of those high qualities which have been inwoven with his weak frame, it seems to me his selfishness has been well disposed of. The dollar which, in the cautious mind, was begrudged to a wee toddler who never lived, for a pair of shoes, has been placed where it has brought new knowledge of the power and wisdom of God, the Creator and Conservator of the Universe. The wisdom thus born out of selfishness will inculcate in those to follow him the folly of selfishness, and the tastelessness of its brightest apples of gold.

BE KIND TO THE OLD BACHELOR.

When he tries to be friendly, give him a lift. His mode of life has left him with many advantages for usefulness which married people have not got. On committees and in preliminary work he is often the best man in the neighborhood. At funerals, in sickness, he has been known to be almost the very instrument of the merciful Father. Teach the young ladies that he is harder to "catch" than they suppose, and perhaps they will turn toward him a portion of their character which will please him better with womankind.

TO HEAR SOME MEN TALK,

and from experience, too, you would think that a breed of creatures born from such women as are now living would be a herd of monsters, incapable of civilization and refinement. And yet the world will go on, and we know, almost, that our posterity will bring about wonders in the arts and sciences, and perhaps even in society itself,—wonders which will even surpass the triumph of our own generation. We are on the eve of both traveling and talking through the bare air. We are in a way to avoid the worst of our wars. It cannot be that the women who will bear the men who will do all these things are to be

JUDGED AS THE BACHELORS VIEW THEM.

The bachelor sees as through a glass, darkly. Being, for the time, incapable of the passion of love, having failed to exercise it when it came upon him, he thus rails at woman. If you are young enough, watch the events of the next thirty years, and see how they will give the lie to such a tirade as this, from

THE SAME BACHELOR

I quoted at the start: "Not one-half of our marriages have unbiased love as a foundation on both sides. (The love is usually on the man's side.) A woman marries for money, position, spite, pride, contrariness, fear of being an old maid, or for a home which she thinks will afford her more pleasure than the one she leaves. Love is the last thing to enter her head, and never her heart. Men of real sound judgment in business throw this judgment entirely aside when they come to select a wife. A man might better remain single than marry with the chances nine out of ten in favor of his making a mistake for life."

SEE HOW LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

of anybody's good points this gentleman displays. The young woman who has worked at ironing in the forenoon until her feet were swollen and her head has got dizzy, comes into the parlor in the evening, all frills and tucks, all "highty-tighty," all full of fun and God's good humor, and impresses my friend with the belief that she has never done an honest hour's labor in her life! Pshaw! she has got more pluck, and nerve, and "sand," than half a dozen men, when it comes to where the need is! She is going to be

THE MOTHER OF AN AMERICAN,

and Americans are not noted for their servility, their laziness, their mediocrity, or their lack of brains! For shame, then to judge a young woman as she appears to you when she is anxious to get rid of you! How would you like to be judged solely at those times when you were "carrying on," and "didn't care whether school kept or not"? That is precisely the way this gentleman has spoken of young women a page back. He thinks they love no one because they have never loved him! He never loved them, and how could he expect them to be swindled? Read his remarks over again, and see how events themselves deny his correctness.

HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAS HE SEEN

follow a drunken wife into a gutter? And, on the contrary, has he not seen the reverse of this sad picture many a time? I heard a Judge say to a poor woman once,—she was all scars: "I would send this woman-beater to the work-house for two hundred days if I did not know you would starve yourself to pay his way out." And then the poor, foolish, faithful heart appealed to his Honor to "spare the man, just once more;" she was sure he was a little the worse for drink when he misused her. What does our friend call this thing in woman, if it be not love? The being capable of a wife's love, and a mother's love, and a sister's love, is not much in danger of the criticisms of a man who has only a front-porch knowledge of all her sex!



SICKNESS.

Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of bread to spare. But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had crept through our bones in some frigid chill. There is no boon so great as health. Of course everybody admits that. But why can we not attach meaning to it? If a man rise in a public gathering and say "I will give a hundred dollars!" he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his hearers know. But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say

"PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH

at all hazards!" no significance so deep attaches, though the one statement is a thousand times as important as the other. I cannot understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really had any vivid feeling for the sick. On this earth each one has to do his own suffering—the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby in the hut of the miner. All who are well go their way rejoicing, even having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled associate. It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed. Two men of affairs meet. One says:

"HOW ARE YE?"

The other responds: "How are ye? Are you going to be at the meeting to-night?" etc., the conversation being now under full headway. The words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of those who stand at the bedside.

BEHOLD THE STRONG MAN IN THE FEVERISH AIR

of the sick-chamber. Last week all his clock-wheels worked with ease, and merrily struck the hours of feast and sleep. Afterward the wheels dragged a little and annoyed him some. Suddenly a whole handful of sand was thrown into the cogs, and the cogs have been grinding it and the hammer striking continuously ever since. His brain is distracted, his soul is sorely perplexed, and his mind is like an infant in house-cleaning time, strangely in the way and infinitely aware of it. Here lies proud-riding vanity, thrown from his high saddle. Kindnesses are showered on him of which he feels that he deserves few, and yet wants more.

SYMPATHY IS EXPRESSED

for him which greatly moves him, for he is accompanying the words he hears with the ills he feels, while the speaker is speaking a conventionality which he would feel had he the ability. The sick man mentally resolves that all the mistakes of his life shall be corrected if he shall survive, and yet there are few who are able to fulfill the programmes thus formulated—frequently the thriftless man is more prodigal after an illness which has stabbed his pride with an advertisement of his indigence than he was before his great vow of future economy was recorded up on the ceiling, where,

IN THE RIFTS OF THE PLASTER,

the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi! Perhaps if the would-be reformer would take a look frequently at those objects in his whilom sick-room which so riveted his fevered attention, some of their old association would return upon him, and do him good. The ancients practiced the memory in this way. After a course of meanderings through a garden, each object represented and recalled some piece of knowledge which it was important the pupil should retain in his mind. "Few persons," says Thomas a Kempis "are made better by the pain and languor of sickness; as few great pilgrims become eminent saints." Here lies your bachelor now. He has always felt that when he got sick he could get his gruel stewed as well by the hired girl of his landlady, as the French say, as by a wife. He lies up there, O, so in need of care and kindness!

HIS BRAGS WERE MADE IN TIME OF STRENGTH,

and he expected to have strength to keep himself stoical. But now he is weak,—weak and truly miserable. He hears the people come in to their supper, go to their rooms, wash, run gayly down-stairs, chat, go down another pair of stairs,—and then come the jarring sounds of plates and knives and spoons, and, worse, the sickening smell of victuals. How can they laugh and joke when he, a man and a brother, lies sick of a fever? Ah! my friend, it would not be so were you the head of the house. All would be changed. The supper-hour would come with a hush instead of a clatter. The light stol'n forth o' the building would leave the whole house in gloom. And in your selfish soul you would be glad, for God so made all of us! Now you turn yourself to the wall, and marvel at the lightness of human words and

THE GREEDINESS OF HUMAN WANTS.

You are little to be pitied in justice—greatly, in mercy! Lie there and pity humanity, for they would be all like you, did not they follow in nature's paths, where the roses of the wayside hide more of their ugliness. All I would impose is that you walk where you will look least hideous, even in your own eyes.

As, in Paradise, when Milton was all ablaze with poetic glory, he waved his more than kingly sceptre and thus ushered in the night—

Now came still evening on— Now glowed the firmament With living sapphires: Hesperus that led The starry host rode brightest—

—So does woman, soft as still Evening, shining as all the starry hosts with goodness and with mercy, come into the night of disease, and soften its harsh desert with the dews of her kindness. Sickness teaches us how good and true is woman, how useful in the world, how necessary to our welfare and proper destiny. If any man have learned this on a sick bed

HE HAS NOT BEEN SICK FOR NAUGHT.

He is a man of progressive ideas and unfolding nature. Sir Walter Scott has put into words a thought that has ever had man's approbation:

O woman! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light, quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!

"It is in sickness," says Hosea Ballou, "that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort and even necessities. This desire, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing." "Sickness," says Burton, "puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a sense of our duty." "It is then," says Pliny, "that man recollects there is a God, and that he himself is but a man. No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt." "In sickness," says Shakspeare, playing with his prepositions, "let me not so much say, 'Am I getting better of my pain?' as 'Am I getting better for it?'"

LET US THEREFORE GIVE UP THE IDEA

of those great reformations which we formulate upon our mattresses of misery, and rather confine ourselves to a few betterments of our lives which are possible. If we are spendthrifts, we should vow to spend our money for goods of more solid worth than a taste of this thing, a whiff of that, or a sight of the other. If we are proud, let us resolve to speak kindly at least to those who have been lately ill. If we are stingy, let us make ready to give, notwithstanding, to those who need as badly as we have needed. If we are doubtful of the goodness of the gentle sex, let us at any rate thereafter except forever their qualities as a faithful succor of

THE MOST MISERABLE OF CREATURES,

a sick man who cannot move from his bed of pain and discontent. If we are impenitent, let us arise out of our wearying couch respectful to those who worship God, and reverent also before God in the presence of other worshipers. Perhaps if we aim our sudden goodness at a lower mark, we may make a record that will not entirely proclaim (as the quick eye of Pope has cynically perceived) our unpromising folly, and our unteachable ignorance of human nature.



SORROW.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.—Shakspeare.

But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.—Campbell.

Gathering clouds crowd thickest round the tallest mountain, yet do their summits, far up above, forever gaze out upon the undimmed sun. So is it with the great heart smitten with deep sorrow. There is no soul upon whom the glory of God's love falls more serenely and uninterruptedly. There is no better friend, no lovelier associate. "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." And comfort does come, in the broad and kindly love and mercy toward humanity which those who have known suffering so frequently evince, "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;" says Chapin, "the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge." Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:

One weeping heart may tone a rural scene To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend; The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse, And swans, in soft and solemn silence float— Grief's snowy celebrants.

It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency, for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us, yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our associates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,

A WIFE LOSES HER HUSBAND.

The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may. She finds a bitterness within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation. Why should the blow have singled her as its object? Then, with the lapse of the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic effects on both mind and body accompanying them. She wanders into the woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from her dead husband for the first time, and her

CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the woods in search of a butternut tree which lives like a hermit in the deep of the forest. It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago! It has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it. "O, my poor, dear husband, have I so forgotten you?" she cries in mental sackcloth and ashes. And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before her and appall her. The time flies by. Soon still another season is here, with

A TROOP OF LITTLE TRAITORS, HAPPY MEMORIES,

carrying her "over the hills and far away" into that dim past whence she emerged, all happiness and health. The conscience now has loosened its harsh rule. The memories play in her brain like children on a lawn, and their merry music often drowns the dirges still sadly chanted in her deeper soul. And thus the winter passes—not in a whirlwind of grief as did the summer, whose days she never saw, or will not know she saw, until they come again hot and heavy with the association of her bitterness. But it is safe to say her dread of those days will exceed the actual grief they cause her, and she can soon look back upon her sorrow, and say that she has mourned

RATHER NOT ENOUGH THAN TOO MUCH.

If there be joined to this a new association, one that nature and God have both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a maiden. Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether she love him or not, for

HAS HE NOT PROCLAIMED IT TO HIS OWN SOUL?

She loves him not! The test is come. He must despise himself as a shallow-hearted hind, or dwell in extacies of adoration over one who will resign herself into the keeping of another, a thing most detestable to this young man. Either horn of the dilemma shows him life, true life. Not a poem or a dream, but as a range of mountains would form if they were piled down from some other world; first a row of little peaks, then monster heights arising where valleys hid, and valleys forming on the points of peaks.

THIS YOUTHFUL PEAK OF GRIEF,

the young man finds in after years, is but the more substantial bottom of two slopes which rise sublimely toward the zenith of his life. He banishes his false conceptions of the grandeur of the human mind. He banishes an attachment which had not a substantial girder under it, and within a few years his heart is all the broader, gentler and more charitable for his young sorrow. Do not think me underrating the poignancy of ill-requited love. It is no mean sorrow. But no great mind ever was crushed under it. No great mind ever was crushed under any sorrow dealt out to humanity.

TRUE GREATNESS,

after all, lies in true humanity, true understanding of the feebleness of our nature and our capacities. We do not overload an animal, merely because it evinces a willingness to make an effort. We therefore must not overweight our soul with sorrow. We must not nurse our woe. We must not have that grand, conceited idea of our nobility which demands of us a great long future of melancholy; but rather must we nurse our bodies, suspecting our liver if our soul be heavy, and blaming our chamber if our brow be clouded. Then, if a high intelligence wait at the couch of our sick soul, as does faithful woman by an invalid, soon will vanish all the clouds, soon will come a brighter vista in the journey of our lives. We are as God has made us, weak, miserable and sinful. Let us expect from ourselves conduct becoming a being weak, sinful and miserable. It would seem that this is the secret of those great lives who profit by adversity. They have charity, for they have erred. They have hope, for it has been their true anchor, never failing. They have withal more consistency than have we, though they have

NEVER MADE SUCH HIGH-SOUNDING REQUISITIONS

on their untried natures. Where they have stepped into the stream of their existence in some new fording-place, they have gone with great caution, not with an immature confidence born of naught save foolish audacity. Their river of life is an open water before their pleasant eyes; they prepare not for a flood in the fall, neither do they make ready to pass over dry-shod when the waters come down in the spring. Though they have the more mercy, they make the lesser appeals for mercy; though they have the more strength, they pray the oftener for aid. Sorrow has brought it about. Affliction has stretched their heart-chords

INTO TRUE HARMONY.

"The safe and general antidote against sorrow," says Dr. Johnson, "is employment. It is commonly observed that among soldiers and seamen, though there is much kindness, there is little grief; they see their friend fall without any of that lamentation which is indulged in security and idleness, because they have no leisure to spare from the care of themselves; and whoever shall keep himself equally busy will find himself equally unaffected with irretrievable losses. Time is observed to wear out sorrow, and its effects might doubtless be accelerated by quickening the succession and enlarging the variety of objects."



THERE IS ANOTHER AND AN UNHAPPY PHASE

of sorrow. "When it is real," says Madame Swetchine, "it is almost as difficult to discover as real poverty. An instinctive delicacy hides the rags of the one and the wounds of the other." "The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue hath it," says the Talmud. "Light griefs do speak," says Seneca, "while sorrow's tongue is bound." "The wringing of the hands and knocking of the breast," says Dr. South, "or the wishing of one's self unborn: all are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind."

NOW COMES RELIGION,

shining down into this Alpine valley of grief, not as the sun of the Alps, but as a continual orb of light; not between a few short hours in a "long, long weary day," but as a constant illumination of the soul, irradiating its beams out upon the countenances of God's afflicted, and setting them before mankind as a beacon for groping humanity. I know of no more perfect expression of the power of sorrow to chasten the soul and draw it nearer the Maker than is contained in

MARIA LOWELL'S "LAMB IN THE SHEPHERD'S ARMS."

I quote it as giving that lesson which my humble prose would never teach:

1. After our child's untroubled breath Up to the Father took its way, And on our home the shade of death, Like a long twilight, haunting lay,

And friends came round with us to weep Her little spirit's swift remove, This story of the Alpine sheep Was told to us by one we love:

2. They, in the valley's sheltering care, Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, And, when the sod grows brown and bare, The shepherd strives to make them climb To airy shelves of pastures green That hang along the mountain-side, Where grass and flowers together lean, And down through mist the sunbeams glide.

3. But nought can tempt the timid things That steep and rugged path to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, And seared below the pastures lie; Till in his arms their lambs he takes Along the dizzy verge to go,— Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, They follow on o'er rock and snow;

4. And, in those pastures lifted fair, More dewy soft than lowland mead, The shepherd drops his lowly care, And sheep and lambs together feed. This parable by Nature breathed Blew on me as the south wind free O'er frozen brooks that float unsheathed From icy thralldom to the sea.

5. A blissful vision, through the night, Would all my happy senses sway, Of the Good Shepherd on the height Or climbing up the starry way, Holding our little lamb asleep; And like the burthen of the sea, Sounded that voice along the deep, Saying, "Arise, and follow me."



POVERTY.

'Tis a little thing To give a cup of water, yet its draught Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips, May give a shock of pleasure to the frame More exquisite than when nectarean juice Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.—Talfourd.

Real poverty, it may not be impossible, is to the individual, more of a question when directed to his country than to his actions. In Ireland or Italy, it seems to me, the greatest of individual excellence in sobriety and economy may not shield the citizen from abject want, which is a terrible thing. But in America the man who is often called "poor" gets as much rest for his body and quite as beneficial food for his stomach as the man whose wealth is the wonder of the world. It is a magnificent land where there is so much food raised and so many clothes made that a man calls himself poor if he have only plenty to eat and wear! Our definition of the word "poverty" is a marvelous corruption of the word. To be poor in the true sense of the word, in this great land, one must have either been sick or criminally negligent. Many a clerk eats as much and dresses as well as Vanderbilt. What does Vanderbilt do with the great number of millions which he controls?

HE FEEDS AND DRESSES AN ARMY

of about one hundred thousand other men. If he kept his wheat, it would rot. If he kept his clothes, they would pass into speedy decay. By spending one hundred and fifty million dollars he is enabled to secure services which return an aggregate result of about one hundred and sixty-five million dollars in a year. Men have eaten up his first one hundred and fifty million dollars, but their works are worth one hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and he has fifteen million dollars profit. Suppose the men took his one hundred and fifty million dollars away from him and ate it up and wore it out in a year, doing no work in the mean time. At the end of the year they would begin starving if they relied on him alone, and he would have neither one hundred and fifty million dollars capital nor fifteen million dollars profit.

VIEWED AS IT IS,

Vanderbilt is really only richer than other people to the extent that he can gratify rational desires more than others, and this at once puts him alongside hundreds of thousands who have money enough to purchase everything they can rationally want. In the system of labor for wages, Vanderbilt is only a commander, having the largest force intrusted to his supervision—or paid with his money; the thing is the same. Almost all

THE ENORMOUSLY RICH MEN OF THE WORLD

have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens. Not many years ago Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of shifting the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune bring about its foolish and chaotic reign. The cares of great wealth are a class of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.

THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit. Men who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon being stranded on that shore of ill-repute to find the sun shining more brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president's parlor, and no conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an ante-room.

BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT

is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men on board a ship, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once. No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then, view poverty as

A REAL, ACTIVE, "INCONVENIENCE,"

as the French wit has put it. "One solitary philosopher maybe great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty," says Isaac Iselin, "but not a whole people." "Poverty" says Lucian, "persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it." "It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty," says Madame Deluzy; "and then it will pass for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure." "A generous and noble spirit" says Dionysius, "cannot be expected to dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread."

"HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL

is the poor man's life," says Bovee, "with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!" "Poverty," says Euripides, "possesses this disease—through want it teaches a man evil." "Poverty," says Saadi, "snatches the reins out of the hands of pity," which is true only in one sense.

MANY PEOPLE ARE GOOD

who would not be so good were they poorer, but the Irish in Ireland are perhaps the poorest and at the same time the most pious people of whom we read or hear. "Poverty makes man satirical, soberly, sadly, bitterly satirical," says Friswell. "Men praise it," says Alexander Smith,

"AS THE AFRICAN WORSHIPS MUMBO JUMBO—

from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it." "It oft deprives a man of all spirit and virtue," says Ben Franklin; "it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."

THE SCENES OF DARKEST POVERTY

in this land of ours are surely the results of ignorance and folly. With the crops which follow each other in our favored region of the earth, and with membership in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man of America has an assurance that no picture so black can be drawn of his lot "in the rainy day." We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat, steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also suffer. But, with industry and sobriety assured,

THE FANGS OF POVERTY

have been drawn, for the poor man in sickness receives his support, and in health contributes his small share to his sick brother. In leaving this painful branch of so vital a portion of any book devoted to the improvement of humanity, let us abjure each other to fly from the sins of idleness and waste, that make this dark panorama in a world which could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fashion, even now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium? Let us come again to the follies of

FALSE POVERTY.

How ridiculous that one should suffer from want of a frill or a furbelow! "I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man poor," says the eloquent Edmund Burke; "I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men." "It is the great privilege of poverty" says Dr. Johnson, "to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure without guard." Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says:

"POVERTY, IN LARGE CITIES

is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance." The tendency of people in comfortable circumstances to move out of a pleasant cottage into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one. We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy homes are thus ruined! It requires much brains to count the ultimate cost. There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does not look out of place in the new. There is additional work to be done which had been entirely overlooked. The servant is a grievious expense. We do not get the result of her work—only the profit. If she earn the one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million dollars. She must be "kept"—must add her clothes to the wash, her meat to the dish, her bed-room to the house. She breaks with a smile. She scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow. From every conceivable cranny creep forth disbursements—the expenses of the rich man creeping like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor. O, pshaw! why will men and women do it? If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar's feast—

THE MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,

of the nineteenth century. I know of an actual instance of a family being forced to eat the bread of charity within the walls of a house for which they had engaged to pay, and had so far paid, the sum of two thousand dollars a year as rent! What foolish thing a vain human being will not do is a more difficult problem than what he will do. If we had no rich people to fire up our self-conceit, we would be happier, though we rose more slowly; yet are we to be despised for being willing to throw the blame so freely from our shoulders. "Poverty is," says Cobbett, "except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty—the shame of being thought poor—it is

A GREAT AND FATAL WEAKNESS,

though arising in this country from the fashion of the times themselves." Let us shake off this fatal weakness. That man is a coward who, from whatever reason, keeps up the expenditure of a rich man a moment longer than his income will warrant it.

"POVERTY IS ONLY CONTEMPTIBLE

when it is felt to be so," says Bovee. "That man," says Bishop Paley, "is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, who suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man, properly speaking, poor, but he." "The poor are only they who seem poor," says Emerson, "and poverty consists in feeling poor." Doubtless you are familiar with the story of the unhappy Sultan to whom the Magi, traveling from the East to his relief, could give no hope unless he could get and wear the shirt of a happy man. Proclamation went forth to all the lands of the empire, offering glittering rewards for a happy man. At last learned doctors and experts, who had gone out into the outer regions, brought in a shepherd, who was vowed to be an entirely happy man. But lo! when he came before the Magi, it was found that

HE HAD NO SHIRT!

The men who have caught this circling planet in the palms of their hands, as God grasps the inconceivable universes, were born poor and struggled in adversity; the men who have throttled the fiery lightning, and chained the fire and the water into willing servitude, were poor boys; the men who have developed the human imagination into a thing almost perfect and unapproachable were poor boys; the men who have led millions of their Maker's feet, were poor both in youth and age. Bear it then, in mind, that all honorable endeavors to ease the yoke of life are good; that all repinings whatsoever are totally ridiculous, and mostly dishonorable.



FACTS ABOUT PROGRESS.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Tennyson.

One of the pillars upon which the atheists and social iconoclasts and demolishers base their erroneous philosophy is a seeming belief that the men of to-day work harder for a living than the men of olden times. Now I will lay hold of this pillar, and, although I be not Samson, I may yet hope to rend an ill-constructed edifice. With the aid of a few figures and a little history the mind may possibly discern, through the centuries behind us, some evidence of that progress which Victor Hugo has called "the stride of God."

It is reasonable to suppose that the poor man, during the period of his veritable history, has always, when not suffering severe privation, eaten nearly the same amount of food in any given number of hours. We may, I think, judge of the amount of work cast to his lot if we can find the ruling values of several of the articles of food which have contributed to sustain his life. I have chosen the earlier civilization of England in my examples, not because the Book of Exodus, the Pyramids, and the temples of Baalbec and Karnac fail to betray the needed evidences of almost super human toil, but because the authorities at my disposal touching upon earlier times fail to furnish me

THE SATISFACTORY COMMERCIAL DATA

also needed as a parallel. Let us, then, put our laborer in England in the year 1350. He had at that time so far progressed that, under certain very restricted circumstances, his life was preserved, and he was allowed to earn wages for his labor. He worked fourteen hours for a legal day's work in winter and fifteen hours in summer, but I have everywhere in the following statements computed his hours as fourteen. If he were a common laborer he received one penny. If he were

A SKILLED FIELD HAND,

he could earn three times as much money. The English penny is to-day a very large copper coin, being worth two cents, but in those times it weighed three times as much as to-day, as did all current coins. In addition to this great weight, money was very scarce, and fully six or seven times as valuable in many commodities as to-day. We will not err far in calling the laborer's penny forty American cents. In 1350, then, the skilled laborer earned 3 pence in a day. He paid of his dear money, 1 shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat, and L1 4 shillings 6 pence for an ox. This means that he paid eight days' (112 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat, and 98 days' (1372 hours') labor for his ox. The ox would to-day rate far below a "scalawag" at the Stock Yards of Chicago or East St. Louis, weighing, perhaps, 400 pounds.

TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER,

in 1550, the same kind of a laborer earned 4 pence in a day. He paid 1 shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat and L1 16 shillings 7 pence for an ox. This means that he paid nearly six days' (about 80 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat, and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his ox. The high price of the latter was justified by its great improvement in weight and quality.

IN THE FORTY-THIRD YEAR OF ELIZABETH

the coinage was lowered to about its present weight. In 1675, therefore, we see the laborer getting 7-1/2 pence for a day's service. But he was compelled to pay 4 shillings 6 pence for a bushel of wheat, and L3 6 shillings for an ox. He thus was going backward, for temporary reasons, however, and had to pay seven days' (98 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his ox. The ox had twice as much beef on him as the ox of 1350.

AND STILL FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS,

the march of the laborer upward was retarded by wars, famines, and "deaths," as their plagues were called. In 1795, one of the darkest of those dark years, we find the skilled laborer receiving 1 shilling 5-1/4 pence per day (still of fourteen hours in winter, fifteen in summer). He paid 7 shillings 10 pence for a bushel of wheat and L16 8 shillings for an ox. This means that he paid five days' (70 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 119 days' (1666 hours') labor for his ox. The ox was what is technically called "a fair critter."

TO-DAY THE SAME LABORER,

working ten hours a day—counting all the perquisites which have fallen to his lot,—the crumbs from the tables of his prosperous superiors,—the same laborer, I say, gets 3 shillings a day. He pays 6 shillings for a bushel of wheat and L12 for an ox. This means that he pays two days' (twenty hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 80 days' (800 hours') labor for his ox. The ox rates better than a butchers' "beast," as the English say. In the meantime,

THE CHILDREN OF THE LABORER

have sailed across the ocean and settled in a land where the fields yield steady harvests and where the genius of the inventor has exceeded with its results the wonders of the Arabian Nights. In this land of freedom and plenty the day laborer gets $1.50 a day. He pays 90 cents to $1.30 for a bushel of wheat, and if he desire such food, he can pay $80 for a monster ox weighing 1600 pounds. He thus pays less than a day's labor of ten hours for his bushel of wheat, and about fifty-three days' (530 hours') labor for his ox. He does not need this high grade of meat, however, as few English laborers ever buy from even the round of such beef, and no ordinary American householder in city or country gets as good once a year.

PROGRESS IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to 267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!

But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time did not work, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never unforeseen.

FOR INSTANCE:

"Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the life of your child. Will you have it? No!! you will not pay one single dollar to save the life of your little child! Here is a man, who, for one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents, will let his child be lowered into the grave—will listen to the clods falling on its little coffin! But ah! I am provided against such men! They cannot escape me! Here is a smaller package which will save your child's life for fifty cents. It is yours. Death has missed his mark!" Now, with the inevitable forethought of

THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND

whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve's surrender to "that first grand thief who clomb into God's fold." Under a statute of Richard II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor. This law stood for centuries, and was reiterated in the seventeenth George II. and the thirty-second George III., along with fixed wages for services rendered. Personal liberty was held to be the privilege of the proprietary class. By a statute of Henry VIII. (1536), children of five years and up, were compelled to labor. A man able to work who refused a proffer of work was, according to law, dragged to the nearest town on a hurdle, stripped, and whipped through the town until his body was covered with blood. For a second offense his right ear was cut off and he received the bastinado. For a third offense he was put to death. An act passed under Edward VI. (1555) provided that the able-bodied laborer refusing work should be branded on the breast with the letter V and adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years. The master might fasten a ring about the neck, arm, or leg.

REFORM.

Under William IV., by the act of 1832, the laboring hours of children were reduced to ten hours. By the act of 1847 women were included in the ten-hour law. By 1867 the power of the English working man had secured the permanence of a custom making ten hours a day's work. In the factories of Nottingham, England, the men make as high as fourteen dollars a week. Improved machinery has raised their wages. At the spinning machines which formerly required two men, who each received $4.50 a week, there is now required one man, who gets $6.25. At the beginning of the present century the workman in these mills earned 4-1/2 shillings a week. At the present day he earns 10-1/2 shillings, with twenty-four hours' less labor.

THE ENGLISH FIELD-LABORER

who now earns 3 shillings a day spends, for a family of eight, 15 shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, sugar and schooling. How much cheese, tea, butter, washing, sugar and schooling did our friend and his cubs of the fourteenth century enjoy?

Invention and economy are keeping far in advance of the effects of growth in population. In 1766 England and Wales had but 8,500,000 inhabitants; now, there are 25,000,000. The same thing is

TRUE OF AMERICA.

I have for authorities "England, Political and Social" by August Laugel, private secretary of the Duc d'Aumale, Notes and Queries, No 283, Green's "History of the English People," "Froude's History of England," and current numbers of the Mark Lane Express.

In the terms applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf, knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and working-man—there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which fell upon Saul of Tarsus as he journeyed toward Damascus.

To the man whose whole mind is given to the work he does, the time goes swiftly. Many a man whom success has translated from the grocery, the plow-factory, the farm, to the matting and the yellow bedsteads of the seaside hotel, finds that he was happier at home, when he was poor, and that he was then often far more comfortable in body.

THE ATHEIST

does not "look upon a beautiful face and see a grinning skull." He must not, then, gaze upon the freest body of workingmen of all the ages and see but a chain of quarry-slaves scourged to their dungeons.

"God is a worker, He has thickly strewn Infinity with grandeur. God is love; He yet shall wipe away Creation's tears, And all the worlds shall summer in His smile."



FAILURE IN LIFE.

Macbeth. If we should fail— Lady Macbeth. We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we'll not fail.—Shakspeare.

You see that scrag over in the woods there? Crack! goes the lightning! The scrag has been hit again! Unfortunate! Now, perhaps you know somebody who is a scrag in society. When the thunder storms of life roll and rumble, tell him to look well to himself. He is very liable to another dose of disaster. Why is this? The reason is plain. There is some particular attraction for the bolt which hits him. There is a loadstone of reason in the earth at his roots for this constant attack of misfortune. However badly off he may be, something still worse will happen to him. If he have something profitable to do with his hands, he will get a felon on his finger. If he have walking to do, he will get a peeled heel. If he have only to sit and attend to a certain thing, he will get the brain fever. If he be expected at seven in the morning, his child will suffer an attack of croup at 6:45. The lightning is darting around him silently all the time, a good deal like the movements of a snake's tongue. After all, it is a scrag that has been struck, and everybody laughs and seems to think it a good joke. It is, indeed, close to the ridiculous to see the number of undoubted afflictions which will beset

"A REAL OLD FAILURE IN LIFE."

He is a good old fellow. He hates with a mortal hate only one thing, and that is hard work; that will make him deliriously ill inside of three days. The boils, and felons, and fevers, and chilblains, and fractures, and bereavements he has had are enough to fill an encyclopedia. He never has worked long at any one thing, and he never will. He can relate to you how the lightning broke off his biggest limb, knocked off his bark, broke him off half-way up, finally split him clear through the trunk, and never hit another tree in the whole piece of timber! This will bring tears to his eyes, for it seems so strange to him. But if you get tears in your eyes, also, hire him by the day for a while, and look into "the pulse of the machine," you will soon understand the wonderful workings of society, and the nicety of that order of things which separates the wheat from the tare. When the winds of adversity sweep down upon us,

IT IS THE CHAFF WHICH RISES ON THE GALE.

Many a man with a bilious attack coming upon his system goes to his work, sets his blood dancing, and, drives away the intruder before the reinforcements of the disease arrive. The failure goes out to the enemy, makes a weak parley, and opens his gates to the first squad that will enter.

WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THESE RANK FAILURES?

Nothing. We can take warning from them. "A failure establishes only this," says Bovee, "that our determination was not strong enough." This is very nearly the truth. We fail because we feel the game to be hardly worth the candle. We are not willing to pay the price and the value of success. We had rather slide down the hill than climb up higher. When you hit your head against a door in the dark, you are stunned. You are then twice as likely as before to hurt yourself. Bear that in mind. Stop. Move with the greatest of caution.

THIS IS WHY SHAKSPEARE SAYS

that when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. When you have failed, try and get a new start, clear of the consequences of the last disaster. You know exactly where you erred, and can guard against the weak places in your judgment, the cause of your defeat. Above all, study the "dead rank failure" in your community, and do everything precisely opposite to the way he invariably operates.



GAINS AND BRAINS.

Virtue without success Is a fair picture shown by an ill light; But lucky men are favorites of heaven: All own the chief, when fortune owns the cause.—Dryden.

Lucky men are favorites of heaven, simply because they have been endowed with that charming blindness which keeps them from seeing when they are whipped in the battle of life. The man of success has usually a greater sense of the value of a ten-dollar note than his clerk who, like the braggart Pistol, has got the world for his oyster, and expects to open that tough old mollusk with his rusty sword. The man of success sees each young helper around him given better opportunities than he himself had to begin with. His astonishment that inexperienced young men should think they have no chance is always noticeable. He half-envies some stripling soldier in the battle who is yet a high private in the rear rank. The high private cannot understand how this envy can be possible, and will not believe it exists. If you will study the lucky man you will see that his "luck" is usually more of a matter of course than an extraordinary happening. Reverse the thing, and you can comprehend it. Here is a brakeman. He gets killed by the cars.

WAS IT NOT ASTONISHING?

Well, yes, it was; still, if anybody were going to be killed, the brakeman would be the most likely to be the victim. Go to the accident insurance office and observe how little anxious they are to take such a risk, and what an enormous premium they ask when they do take one! Here is a man running a powder-factory. The insurance men will not touch him at all! Now our man of success is like the brakeman, in a sense. He is always on the train, always between the cars, always standing in the frog. If any such thing as luck is out, it must hit him, or some other brakeman like him. Certainly, it will not touch the man asleep in his house

HALF A MILE FROM THE TRACK!

You have a very small chance to draw money in a lottery, and it is a very foolish thing to throw away earnings buying tickets—yet of two fools who expected to draw the grand prize, that one would be the greatest who had no ticket in the lottery! The man of success wants something to strike around his premises. He, therefore, has got conductors of the celestial fluid on his house, and on his barns. His chicken-coops, his corn-cribs point to heaven, and even the stumps in his back yard

BRISTLE WITH LIGHTNING-RODS.

Clap! comes the bolt; the man of success is the one who has been hit, and those persons who do not understand it are astonished at his luck! The man of success is a stone; there are a number of eggs who are bent on dancing in the same cotillon with him; they think he has great luck to last through to such music! The man of success is a thoroughbred; his sire won a Derby; all the drayhorses believe that, when this lucky thoroughbred runs,

THE EARTH MOVES BACKWARD

beneath his feet, to help him in overcoming distance! The man of success is a lightning calculator; the spectators all think he is a lucky fellow to guess at the sum of a great block of figures so quickly and always guess right; they never could do it!

"LUCK" SAYS RICHARD COBDEN,

"is ever waiting for something to turn up. Labor, with keen eyes and strong will, will turn up something. Luck lies in bed, and wishes the postman would bring him the news of a legacy. Labor turns out at six o'clock, and with busy pen or ringing hammer lays the foundation of a competence. Luck whines. Labor whistles. Luck relies on chance. Labor on character." The man of success who owns a mill is seen in the water up to his waist, dragging a log behind him. "Is he not lucky to get his dam fixed so soon after the flood!" say the neighbors. The man of success who owns a grocery has got ten barrels of flour on the sidewalk, two casks of petroleum in the alley, and twelve barrels of sugar on his trucks. At night the barrels are all in their places, and, so far as I have ever seen,—in the retail business, at least,—it was not the clerks of the man of success who did

THE HEAVY END OF THE LIFTING.

"I never" says Addison, "knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest, who complained of bad luck. A good character, good habits, and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all the ill-luck that fools ever dreamed of." "Strong men believe in cause and effect," says Emerson. "There are no chances so unlucky," says Rochefoucauld, "that people are not able to reap some advantage from them, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage."

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LUCK,

we never mean that a man is lucky to be endowed with successful qualities. So long as we do not go back to the real matter of fortune, which lies in the character, let us, at least, be intelligent, and stop talking about one man having any more good things happen to him than another. There is only one sure thing about events, and that is the law of chance. If men take to chance, they will come out even, if it be a fair chance.

THIS IS CERTAIN.

If you try to match the penny some one has covered, and fail ten times in succession, it is a certainty that you will succeed often enough, ere long, to make your failures and your successes balance. Everything which depends entirely on chance is exactly even. If the man you envy to-day on account of some piece of unquestionably good luck, were to be as closely watched to-morrow, he would be seen to suffer some piece of as unquestionably bad luck. You cannot help noticing his good fortune, and he never howls about his disasters.

FORTUNE TELLERS

thrive on this principle—taking even guesses, and trusting to the victim's remembrance of all that comes true and his forgetfulness of all that does not.

Put up your lightning-rods, get between the cars, begin making powder—increase your probabilities of getting blown up, of having something out of the ordinary run happen to you. If you are food for big fish, go where the big fish are, and you will not be left over for lunch. If you can be useful to a great railroad man, a great statesman, or, even, a great nation, they are going to thrive on you. They will take a taste of you almost before you know it. If you are smart, sober, and were not born tired, there is no bad luck that can get even a shade the best of you.



DISCIPLINE.

"Tarry a while," says Slow.—Mother Goose.

Our generation is formed largely of men who went to war and experienced the trials and the combats of one of the greatest commotions of all history. Upon those men was imposed the glorious rod of discipline. "Thus far and no farther!" is written upon their broad foreheads as plainly as the God of the great sea marks it on the rocks with which he has hemmed the shores, and I would not wonder if the vast prosperity of the present day were largely attributable to that stern fondness with which the true man passes into the action of daily life, and obeys orders under fire. Young man, carve yourself down to that rugged line that will make you a fitting part of the structure in which you are an element.

BE RATHER THE GIRDER

holding the building than the creaking clapboard flapping in the wind. When you get an order from your employer, school yourself to move mechanically to the action implied. Glory in it. Be sure, only, that you are carrying out the wishes of your superior. Make it your pleasure. It will become an intense delight. Suppose that you are allowed a holiday. You return to your home and find a command to appear at your place of business. A delay in finding you has happened. You can reach your employer just at the end of business hours. You say "I will not mind this; there is not time enough." Alas! You have done yourself

A CRUEL WRONG.

You have given an entrance to a wedge that will rend you in pieces. On the other hand, you do not stop to look twice at the dial. You go. Good! You have strengthened your character. You can depend on yourself. You admire yourself. "I received your directions at 5.30. I have obeyed orders." Drill of this sort will soon hew your mind down to the solid heart of oak. You will know what you mean when you say a thing. "I will get up at 6 o'clock." When 6 o'clock arrives, and you are aroused, your mind is not

A MESS OF PULP,

ready to take the impression of the first lazy wish that comes over you. No, your brain says resolutely, "I will arise," and lo! a victory!—and no small one either. In this way, true firmness is made. It is a growth. Beware of the insects which beset the lordly tree, withering its leaves and driving its sap into the earth.

"Let us put a cable under the ocean," says Cyrus Field. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us put the cities within actual speaking distance!" say Bell, and Gray and Edison. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us print thirty thousand newspapers in an hour, and give them out of the press folded, and pasted, and cut!" say Potter, and Hoe, and Kahler. "Tarry a while" says Slow. And yet, in spite of Slow and Sleepyhead, wonders have accumulated upon wonders, until the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's Travels are only the creations of a poor fancy, while the intimations which the future affords us stagger the understanding and make us almost idolatrous in our admiration of the quiet, keen-acting men who have dared out into fairy-land and returned laden like the spies coming from Canaan.

Our whole history is one of discipline. And what has it made of us? A nation that has sung

THE DEATH-KNELL OF THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.

I think a good deal of these lines of James Russell Lowell:

This land o' ourn, I tell ye's gut to be A better country than man ever see; I feel my sperit swellin with a cry That seems to say: "Break forth and prophesy." O strange New World, that yet wast never young, Whose youth from thee by gripin' want was wrung, Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread, An' who grewst strong thru' shifts, and wants, an' pains. Nursed by stern men, with empires in their brains!

Another sweet poet has sung:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

There can be no question that wealth is fast accumulating. Let fathers, and mothers, and preceptors spur the rising generation to that love of accuracy, of "right dress," as the soldiers say, which puts each man in his place, certain to stay there as long as he has agreed to, and certain to act when the fitting time arrives.

THE ORGAN AND ITS PIPES AND REEDS.

Perhaps I can impress the true necessity of discipline no more forcibly than by comparing society to a grand organ upon which the Creator sounds his mighty fugue of years. We are the pipes—some the colossal columns which shake the world, and others the tiny tubes which make a feeble cry, almost unheard. No one of us must sound his note save in that proper place and at that proper time which Duty indicates. We mar a perfect harmony by ill-tempered silence, and perhaps ruin the labors of our associates by a continuous sounding of our own ridiculous reed.

WHEREVER WE ARE

In the factory, the counting house, the workshops of the grand industries,—or on the broad acres which watch so fondly for the sun, let us be careful, when there is a troubling jar, a fatal discord, that our key is not the guilty one.



BOOKS.

—Books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good; Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.—Wordsworth.

By the aid of books we multiply our sensations a million-fold. Often the reader actually feels what he reads. Such impressions would perhaps never have fallen to his lot in the ordinary way of getting experience. Our indebtedness, then, to the art of printing, is perhaps greater than to any other of the remarkable discoveries which have lent enduring charms to human life. And yet, with all its progress, the book-reading world is still in its infancy. The people do not read half enough, they do not discriminate wisely between good reading and indifferent reading, and they read too much matter of an ephemeral nature, little calculated to be of the slightest benefit to them a week after its perusal. If a man lived on the banks of a beautiful lake, and went down to its shore each pleasant day to take a ride, and, after an excursion upon the peaceful waters, stove his boat in, or cast it adrift, he would be actually following the practice of our people of the present day. The man who owns a library in these times, is considered either a book-worm or an opulent citizen. And yet what treasures are within everyone's reach! Suppose you buy and read a volume. You are

FILLED WITH IDEAS NEW TO YOU,

and you derive great pleasure. Keep that book a year and read it over. It is safe to say you will gain more benefit and reap greater enjoyment from the second perusal than from the first. A library of books, every one of which you have read, is a mine without "walls." It is a merry assembly of old friends ever faithful. Grief cannot drive them away. Slander cannot alienate them. They cannot have rival interests. They cannot want anything you have got, and you can take all they have got,

AND NOT ROB THEM AT ALL.

You have a memory which is as treacherous as the most of the other attributes of human nature. You sit down and read two hours on an interesting topic. A friend opens the same subject to you, a day afterward, in conversation, and you fairly carry him by storm. That is unfair, for you should say you have been "posting up"—but it shows the value of a library. By frequent "posting" on whatever you have read, you become a learned man, which is

A TITLE OF GREAT CREDIT AND DIGNITY

in most men's eyes. The men who read once and "read everything" are never called "learned." They are called "superficial." It is a little unjust, for they have been just as studious as the "learned men," but they have spread themselves out too thin. They have not bought and kept the books they have read, and they cannot remember the vital points. Suppose you recollect that Lord Bacon has said something very wise about riches. That is all you can call to mind. That carries no impression to anybody. If you had the book in which you saw the speech, you could repeat it accurately, and the probability is that the next time you referred to it you could give

THE GIST OF THE WHOLE THOUGHT,

and, by the next attempt, the language itself. You could say to your friend when you were talking about wealth, that you have admired that speech of Bacon where he says that he cannot call riches better than the "baggage" of virtue; that he thinks the Roman word "impedimenta" still better; that, as baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue; it cannot be spared or left behind, but, in his quaint expression, "it hindereth the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or disturbeth the victory." Your friend would be gratified with so perfect a figure of speech, and he would never call you "superficial." That is real experience. It is not theory. A book has little value to a man until he has read it at least twice. He has then labeled and pigeon-holed it, and really needs to possess it.

A MAN OUGHT TO READ

his favorite portions of Shakspeare a thousand times—of the Bible a million times. Reading is much more like painting than we think. Go into a palace car. Do you think this polish was put on the wood with one application of the brush—with two, three, four? No; it would possibly be cheaper to cover it with silk plush than to go over it as the skilled workmen have done. Let us buy less ephemeral stuff, to be set adrift and stove in when we have skimmed over it. Let us season our reading, polish it, grain it, varnish it, repolish it and revarnish it, until we are just like it ourselves—clear, concise, intelligent. How enjoyable it is to meet an intelligent person!

WHAT A CHARM

there is about a comrade who can understand what you say, and who can swap ideas with you "even Steven!" It cannot be done without books.

Considering the vast importance of learning in saving labor and reducing the actual cost of existence, there has been little growth in the business of bookmaking compared with what there should have been. The trade in books in America is large, because the country is large. Everything is large here. Comparatively, however, it probably sinks below fishing for mackerel as an industry. As it is now, a shockingly large portion of the industry such as it is is given over to costly bindings. It does not seem that the people, even when they first had books, cared so much for the privilege of reading as they did for a gaudy covering to the volume, on which they could expend a barbaric love for ornament. The wise men of those times marveled, just as the wise men marvel nowadays. "Learning hath gained most by those books," says Old Fuller, "by which the printers have lost." Our follies in the way of "books that are all binding" are almost microscopically small when put beside those of the olden times, when, one would think the art of printing, being new, would have been best appreciated, for surely the grass looks the greenest to us in the spring! Let us do something more than

MAKE JEWELRY OUT OF THE ART OF GUTTENBERG.

"A book may be as great a thing as a battle," said Disraeli, and he meant by that a decisive battle. Now there are sometimes very decisive battles. A Turk once came up against the walls of Vienna and the walls of Tours, in France, and, if he had got through, you and I would to-day, so the scholars say, be "good Mussulmans," instead of Christians, living in freedom and decency. "When a book," says Bruyere, "raises your spirits, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the work by; it is good, and made by a good workman." The books you buy should have large clear type. They are to be

YOUR COMPANIONS THROUGH LIFE.

Your eyes will not be so bright in their old age. The volumes should not be bulky—that is, for true, practical use. "Great books," says Clulow, "like large skulls, have often the least brains." "Books," says Dr. Johnson, "that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful, after all." There is no objection to a costly and beautifully-bound Bible, out of which you may read each day with added veneration, but your sons and daughters should have pocket copies. From these modest little volumes, the marvels of language and thought may be gathered without seeming effort.

Do not be afraid you are spending too much money on reading. If you read each book as you buy it, you cannot buy too many—that is, if you are an honorable man, earning your living in the world, and not sponging it off some one else. Read your book slowly, above all things. Read it as you would ride in your boat on the waters, looking down at the pebbles, the fishes, the grasses, and the roots of the pond-lilies which, being of God's creation like yourself, send a responsive thrill of acquaintance through your heart as you float above them. You can, at best, but glide over a book. Even the writer has been but a passing observer of a few of its truths. It is

THE RECORD OF THE CENTURIES.

Respect it. "My latest passion will be for books," said Frederick the Great, in his old age. He had hardly looked down into the waters until he got nearly to the other shore. Gibbon declared that a taste for books was the pleasure and glory of his life; and Carlyle, who, it is supposed, was better acquainted with books than any man who has yet lived, declared that of all man could do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy were the things we call books.

HELP OTHERS.

If any members of your family have the love of books, aid them in satisfying it. Such are the salt of the earth. They are the blazed trees in the dark forests of the present generations, to mark out that course which shall, in future ages, be the highway of the whole world.



FRIENDSHIP.

The friend thou hast, and his adoption tried, Grapple him to thy soul with hooks of steel.—Shakspeare.

I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd, "How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!" But grant me still a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper "Solitude is sweet!"—Cowper.

"Whatever the number of a man's friends" says Lord Lytton, "there are times in his life when he has one too few." "Life," says Sydney Smith, "is to be fortified by many friendships." Says Bishop Hare: "Friendship is love without its flowers or veil." "A faithful friend is the true image of the Deity," said Napoleon, who never believed he had a true friend not a born fool. "A friend loveth at all times," says the Bible. Says Herr Gotthold: "with a clear sky, a bright sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty, but let fortune frown and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will prove

LIKE THE STRINGS OF THE LUTE,

of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch." "What an argument in favor of social connections," says Lord Greville, "is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasures we have more." Horace Walpole has given clear expression to one of the chief pleasures of friendship:

"OLD FRIENDS

are the great blessings of one's latter years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow old friends? My age forbids that. Still less can they grow companions. Is it friendship to explain half one says? One must relate the history of one's memory and ideas; and what is that to the young but old stories?" "Fast won, fast lost," says Shakspeare. Says Dr. Johnson: "If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair!"

ALL THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF THE SAGES

on this subject there is a tinge of melancholy. "There are no friends!" says Aristotle. "There have been fewer friends on earth than Kings," says the poet Cowley. Why is this? Let us peer into the solemn question. The ideal of true manhood is easily formulated. Alas! what an abyss separates a man's daily life, as it is, from that high quality he has pictured in his imagination. We are all the time reaching for

THINGS WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND,

and could not assimilate with if they were placed at our disposal. In this way a weary, well-read novel-reader, worn out in all lines of light letters, enters a circulating library, and queruously asks: "Have you any new books?" She expects a negative answer, and in that case would suffer a keen disappointment. The man says "Yes," and brings out several new books. Every one of these is new in every sense. It may be the most trivial set of pages yet printed in this era of scribblers, or, yet, it may be a great work, worthy of the attention of the thoughtful, and the commendation of the pure in heart. Nobody can tell. Then, illogically, she asks: "Is this good?" or "Is that good?" and upon being reminded that she wanted something new or nothing, she asks for something by May Agnes Fleming, or Mary Jane Holmes, and goes off happy, to re-read those expressions which have so well pleased her in the past.