Mrs. Stowe’s Writings.

———
LITTLE FOXES.
One Volume.
———
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
One Volume.
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THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
One Volume.
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AGNES OF SORRENTO.
One Volume.
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UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
One Volume.
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THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
One Volume.
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OLDTOWN FOLKS.
One Volume.
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James R. Osgood, & Co., Publishers.

LITTLE FOXES.

BY
CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD,
AUTHOR OF “HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.”

BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1875.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.

CONTENTS.

LITTLE FOXES.

I.
FAULT-FINDING.

“PAPA, what are you going to give us this winter for our evening readings?” said Jennie.

“I am thinking, for one thing,” I replied, “of preaching a course of household sermons from a very odd text prefixed to a discourse which I found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel in the garret.”

“Don’t say sermon, Papa,—it has such a dreadful sound; and on winter evenings one wants something entertaining.”

“Well, treatise, then,” said I, “or discourse, or essay, or prelection; I’m not particular as to words.”

“But what is the queer text that you found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel?”

“It was one preached upon by your mother’s great-great-grandfather, the very savory and much-respected Simeon Shuttleworth, ‘on the occasion of the melancholy defections and divisions among the godly in the town of West Dofield’; and it runs thus,—‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.’”

“It’s a curious text enough; but I can’t imagine what you are going to make of it.”

“Simply an essay on Little Foxes,” said I, “by which I mean those unsuspected, unwatched, insignificant little causes, that nibble away domestic happiness, and make home less than so noble an institution should be.

“You may build beautiful, convenient, attractive houses,—you may hang the walls with lovely pictures and stud them with gems of Art; and there may be living there together persons bound by blood and affection in one common interest, leading a life common to themselves and apart from others; and these persons may each one of them be possessed of good and noble traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of generosity, of good principle, of religion; and yet, through the influence of some of these perverse, nibbling, insignificant little foxes, half the clusters of happiness on these so promising vines may fail to come to maturity. A little community of people, all of whom would be willing to die for each other, may not be able to live happily together; that is, they may have far less happiness than their circumstances, their fine and excellent traits, entitle them to expect.

“The reason for this in general is that home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserves; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much débris of cast-off and every-day clothing. Hence has arisen the common proverb, ‘No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre’; and the common warning, ‘If you wish to keep your friend, don’t go and live with him.’”

“Which is only another way of saying,” said my wife, “that we are all human and imperfect; and the nearer you get to any human being, the more defects you see. The characters that can stand the test of daily intimacy are about as numerous as four-leaved clovers in a meadow; in general, those who do not annoy you with positive faults bore you with their insipidity. The evenness and beauty of a strong, well-defined nature, perfectly governed and balanced, is about the last thing one is likely to meet with in one’s researches into life.”

“But what I have to say,” replied I, “is this,—that, family-life being a state of unreserve, a state in which there are few of those barriers and veils that keep people in the world from seeing each other’s defects and mutually jarring and grating upon each other, it is remarkable that it is entered upon and maintained generally with less reflection, less care and forethought, than pertain to most kinds of business which men and women set their hands to. A man does not undertake to run an engine or manage a piece of machinery without some careful examination of its parts and capabilities, and some inquiry whether he have the necessary knowledge, skill, and strength to make it do itself and him justice. A man does not try to play on the violin without seeing if his fingers are long and flexible enough to bring out the harmonies and raise his performance above the grade of dismal scraping to that of divine music. What should we think of a man who should set a whole orchestra of instruments upon playing together without the least provision or forethought as to their chord, and then howl and tear his hair at the result? It is not the fault of the instruments that they grate harsh thunders together; they may each be noble and of celestial temper; but united without regard to their nature, dire confusion is the result. Still worse were it, if a man were supposed so stupid as to expect of each instrument a rôle opposed to its nature,—if he asked of the octave-flute a bass solo, and condemned the trombone because it could not do the work of the many-voiced violin.

“Yet just so carelessly is the work of forming a family often performed. A man and woman come together from some affinity, some partial accord of their nature which has inspired mutual affection. There is generally very little careful consideration of who and what they are,—no thought of the reciprocal influence of mutual traits,—no previous chording and testing of the instruments which are to make lifelong harmony or discord,—and after a short period of engagement, in which all their mutual relations are made as opposite as possible to those which must follow marriage, these two furnish their house and begin life together.

“Then in many cases the domestic roof is supposed at once to be the proper refuge for relations and friends on both sides, who also are introduced into the interior concert without any special consideration of what is likely to be the operation of character on character, the play of instrument with instrument;—then follow children, each of whom is a separate entity, a separate will, a separate force in the circle; and thus, with the lesser powers of servants and dependants, a family is made up. And there is no wonder if all these chance-assorted instruments, playing together, sometimes make quite as much discord as harmony. For if the husband and wife chord, the wife’s sister or husband’s mother may introduce a discord; and then again, each child of marked character introduces another possibility of confusion.

“The conservative forces of human nature are so strong and so various, that with all these drawbacks the family state is after all the best and purest happiness that earth affords. But then, with cultivation and care, it might be a great deal happier. Very fair pears have been raised by dropping a seed into a good soil and letting it alone for years; but finer and choicer are raised by the watchings, tendings, prunings of the gardener. Wild grape-vines bore very fine grapes, and an abundance of them, before our friend Dr. Grant took up his abode at Iona, and, studying the laws of Nature, conjured up new species of rarer fruit and flavor out of the old. And so, if all the little foxes that infest our domestic vine and fig-tree were once hunted out and killed, we might have fairer clusters and fruit all winter.”

“But, Papa,” said Jennie, “to come to the foxes; let’s know what they are.”

“Well, as the text says, little foxes, the pet foxes of good people, unsuspected little animals,—on the whole, often thought to be really creditable little beasts, that may do good, and at all events cannot do much harm. And as I have taken to the Puritanic order in my discourse, I shall set them in sevens, as Noah did his clean beasts in the ark. Now my seven little foxes are these:—Fault-Finding, Intolerance, Reticence, Irritability, Exactingness, Discourtesy, Self-Will. And here,” turning to my sermon, “is what I have to say about the first of them.”

FAULT-FINDING,—

A most respectable little animal, that many people let run freely among their domestic vines, under the notion that he helps the growth of the grapes, and is the principal means of keeping them in order.

Now it may safely be set down as a maxim, that nobody likes to be found fault with, but everybody likes to find fault when things do not suit him.

Let my courteous reader ask him or herself if he or she does not experience a relief and pleasure in finding fault with or about whatever troubles them.

This appears at first sight an anomaly in the provisions of Nature. Generally we are so constituted that what it is a pleasure to us to do it is a pleasure to our neighbor to have us do. It is a pleasure to give, and a pleasure to receive. It is a pleasure to love, and a pleasure to be loved; a pleasure to admire, a pleasure to be admired. It is a pleasure also to find fault, but not a pleasure to be found fault with. Furthermore, those people whose sensitiveness of temperament leads them to find the most fault are precisely those who can least bear to be found fault with; they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on other men’s shoulders, but they themselves cannot bear the weight of a finger.

Now the difficulty in the case is this: There are things in life that need to be altered; and that things may be altered, they must be spoken of to the people whose business it is to make the change. This opens wide the door of fault-finding to well-disposed people, and gives them latitude of conscience to impose on their fellows all the annoyances which they themselves feel. The father and mother of a family are fault-finders, ex officio; and to them flows back the tide of every separate individual’s complaints in the domestic circle, till often the whole air of the house is chilled and darkened by a drizzling Scotch mist of querulousness. Very bad are these mists for grape-vines, and produce mildew in many a fair cluster.

Enthusius falls in love with Hermione, because she looks like a moonbeam,—because she is ethereal as a summer cloud, spirituelle. He commences forthwith the perpetual adoration system that precedes marriage. He assures her that she is too good for this world, too delicate and fair for any of the uses of poor mortality,—that she ought to tread on roses, sleep on the clouds,—that she ought never to shed a tear, know a fatigue, or make an exertion, but live apart in some bright, ethereal sphere worthy of her charms. All which is duly chanted in her ear in moonlight walks or sails, and so often repeated that a sensible girl may be excused for believing that a little of it may be true.

Now comes marriage,—and it turns out that Enthusius is very particular as to his coffee, that he is excessively disturbed if his meals are at all irregular, and that he cannot be comfortable with any table arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable mother, lately deceased in the odor of sanctity; he also wants his house in perfect order at all hours. Still he does not propose to provide a trained housekeeper; it is all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish girls, under the superintendence of this angel who was to tread on roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an earthly care. Neither has Enthusius ever considered it a part of a husband’s duty to bear personal inconveniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood for Hermione,—nay, has often frantically proposed the same in the hours of courtship, when of course nobody wanted it done, and it could answer no manner of use; but now to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed such as these:—

“My dear, this tea is smoked: can’t you get Jane into the way of making it better?”

“My dear, I have tried; but she will not do as I tell her.”

“Well, all I know is, other people can have good tea, and I should think we might.”

And again at dinner:—

“My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is always overdone.”

“Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just right.”

“Well, almost always.”

“Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It’s very difficult to get things done with such a girl.”

“My mother’s things were always well done, no matter what her girl was.”

Again: “My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal. I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size”; or, “My dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?” or, “My dear, I shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be regular”; or, “My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are ironed,—it is perfectly scandalous”; or, “My dear, you must not let Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor”; or, “My dear, you must stop the children from playing in the garret”, or, “My dear, you must see that Maggie doesn’t leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the front hall”; and so on, up stairs and down stairs, in the lady’s chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, “my dear” is to see that nothing goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.

Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears, and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than ever,—and perhaps he does. The only difficulty is that she has passed out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it at the moment. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticise and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic ménage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.

Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved, not provoked,—who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.

But there is another side of the picture,—where the wife, provoked and indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen arrows of her woman’s wit searches and penetrates every joint of the husband’s armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more capable in this sort of conflict.

Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given them only to harass and provoke,—thrusting and piercing with a certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.

For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!—a dinner underdone, too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish broken!—and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous, very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built and coal burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,—their happiness. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of love; and nothing so surely burns away love as constant fault-finding.

For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof, occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid stage has once set in, the restoration of love seems wellnigh impossible.

For example: Enthusius, having risen this morning in the best of humors, in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of her g’s quite so long; and Hermione fires up with with—

“And, pray, what else wouldn’t you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of the things in me that need correcting.”

“My dear, you are unreasonable.”

“I don’t think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements of my lord and master sometimes.”

“Now, my dear, you really are very silly.”

“Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has lost the charm of novelty.”

“Come now, Hermione, don’t let’s quarrel.”

“My dear sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I’m sure I was only asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning, and the tea, and the toast, and the steak, and the servants, and the front-hall mat, and the upper-story hall-door, and the basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my general education. I shall set about the tails of my g’s at once, but trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need emendation.”

Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.

“If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe that it is not good manners to drum on the table,” says his fair opposite.

“Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!” exclaims Enthusius, rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his dinner at Delmonico’s.

Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a sprite of a woman,—the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been the guilty partner in this morning’s encounter; he has said only what is fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after all, the fault is remotely his.

When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?

If his little wife has to learn her domestic rôle of household duty, as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities, a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what, after marriage, proved an annoyance.

And if a man finds that he has a wife ill-adapted to wifely duties, does it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as little preface, apology, or circumlocution to his business manager, to his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never criticised the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two, to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find, too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at, and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill than a man.

But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make manifest the weak point in everything.

We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do, they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they have abated by not trying to please.

We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs, exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper, without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he breathed freely as a man released. He married again,—a woman with no beauty, but much love and goodness,—a woman who asked little, blamed seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism from her lips, who criticised so little and so thoughtfully, weighed more with him than many out-spoken words. So different is the same human being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!

I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticise him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hardness or irritable moroseness.

A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out,—“O, you’ve left the door open! I do wish you wouldn’t always leave the door open! And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I tell you to wipe your feet?”

“Now there you’ve thrown your cap on the sofa again. When will you learn to hang it up?”

“Don’t put your slate there; that isn’t the place for it.”

“How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?”

“Don’t sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing.”

“Child, how your hair looks! Do go up stairs and comb it.”

“There, if you haven’t torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a boy!”

“Don’t speak so loud; your voice goes through my head.”

“I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I have been saving for brown flour.”

“I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor.”

“Jim’s been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best paper.”

Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run the gantlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it than he is?

No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be terrible reactions?

Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or poison it with foul air, or bring innumerable inconveniences. The setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated, despairing, and with good reason: the maid is the same, and with equally good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy in her beautifully arranged house.

There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their welfare a trap. Their gas and their water and their fire and their elegances and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their Christian graces day and night,—so that, if their house is kept in order, their temper and religion are not.

I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are in will and purpose real saints. Their souls go up to heaven,—its love, its purity, its rest,—with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in church; and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross looks, the universal nervous irritability, that result from this constant jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.

Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges,—accept them,—rejoice in them,—smile and be quiet, silent, patient, and loving under them,—and the convent can teach her no more; she is a victorious saint.

When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes coughing, sneezing, strangling,—when the gas is blown out in the nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the danger of such a proceeding,—when the tumblers on the dinner-table are found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business of washing and wiping,—when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the consequences,—when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below, and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember them,—there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting. It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and distresses, but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the Apostle, might say, “When I am weak, then am I strong.”

The burden ceases to gall when we have learned how to carry it. We can suffer patiently, if we see any good come of it, and say, as an old black woman of our acquaintance did of an event that crossed her purpose, “Well, Lord, if it’s you, send it along.”

But that this may be done, that home-life, in our unsettled, changing state of society, may become peaceful and restful, there is one Christian grace, much treated of by mystic writers, that must return to its honor in the Christian Church. I mean,—THE GRACE OF SILENCE.

No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value of NOT SPEAKING. “Speech is silvern, but silence is golden,” is an old and very precious proverb.

“But,” say many voices, “what is to become of us, if we may not speak? Must we not correct our children and our servants and each other? Must we let people go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter?”

No; fault must be found; faults must be told, errors corrected. Reproof and admonition are duties of householders to their families, and of all true friends to one another.

But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own lives and the lives of others, and ask, How much of the fault-finding which prevails has the least tendency to do any good? How much of it is well-timed, well-pointed, deliberate, and just, so spoken as to be effective?

“A wise reprover upon an obedient ear” is one of the rare things spoken of by Solomon,—the rarest, perhaps, to be met with. How many really religious people put any of their religion into their manner of performing this most difficult office? We find fault with a stove or furnace which creates heat only to go up chimney and not warm the house. We say it is wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings, church-services, and sacraments; they create and excite lovely, gentle, holy feelings,—but, if these do not pass out into the atmosphere of daily life, and warm and clear the air of our homes, there is a great waste in our religion.

We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that we are as awkward in heavenly things, as unfit for the Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and Mike, and the little beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlors. We have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed that “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable,” and then we draw near in the sacrament to that Incarnate Divinity whose infinite love covers all our imperfections with the mantle of His perfections. But when we return, do we take our servants and children by the throat because they are as untrained and awkward and careless in earthly things as we have been in heavenly? Does no remembrance of Christ’s infinite patience temper our impatience, when we have spoken seventy times seven, and our words have been disregarded? There is no mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the Church excites. What we want is to have it used in common life, instead of going up like hot air in a fireplace to lose itself in the infinite abysses above.

In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful examples in Holy Writ. When Saint Paul has a reproof to administer to delinquent Christians, how does he temper it with gentleness and praise! how does he first make honorable note of all the good there is to be spoken of! how does he give assurance of his prayers and love!—and when at last the arrow flies, it goes all the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.

But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than Paul, who made His home on earth with twelve plain men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to learn,—and who to the very day of His death were still contending on a point which He had repeatedly explained, and troubling His last earthly hours with the old contest, “Who should be greatest.” When all else failed, on His knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing for love the office of a slave, he said, “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

When parents, employers, and masters learn to reprove in this spirit, reproofs will be more effective than they now are. It was by the exercise of this spirit that Fénelon transformed the proud, petulant, irritable, selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle, tolerant of others, and severe only to himself: it was he who had for his motto, that “Perfection alone can bear with imperfection.”

But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite aim, how much is there that does not profess or intend or try to do anything more than give vent to an irritated state of feeling! The nettle stings us, and we toss it with both hands at our neighbor; the fire burns us, and we throw coals and hot ashes at all and sundry of those about us.

There is fretfulness, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting remark; there is grumbling, a northeast storm that never clears; there is scolding, the thunder-storm with lightning and hail. All these are worse than useless; they are positive sins, by whomsoever indulged,—sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in polite society.

All these are for the most part but the venting on our fellow-beings of morbid feelings resulting from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general ill health.

A minister eats too much mince-pie, goes to his weekly lecture, and, seeing only half a dozen people there, proceeds to grumble at those half-dozen for the sins of such as stay away. “The Church is cold, there is no interest in religion,” and so on: a simple outpouring of the blues.

You and I do in one week the work we ought to do in six; we overtax nerve and brain, and then have weeks of darkness in which everything at home seems running to destruction. The servants never were so careless, the children never so noisy, the house never so disorderly, the State never so ill-governed, the Church evidently going over to Antichrist. The only thing, after all, in which the existing condition of affairs differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used up our nervous energy, and are looking at the world through blue spectacles. We ought to resist the devil of fault-finding at this point, and cultivate silence as a grace till our nerves are rested. There are times when no one should trust himself to judge his neighbors, or reprove his children and servants, or find fault with his friends,—for he is so sharp-set that he cannot strike a note without striking too hard. Then is the time to try the grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the power of prayer.

But it being premised that we are never to fret, never to grumble, never to scold, and yet it being our duty in some way to make known and get rectified the faults of others, it remains to ask how; and on this head we will improvise a parable of two women.

Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly religious. In all the minutiæ of woman’s life she manifests an inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a chronometer.

Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,—a fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault; she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes them felt by the most obdurate.

Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness, whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always sure to do something dreadful every day.

The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard, and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but that she does not take the right way. She has set it down in her mind that to blame a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never learned that it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, and that people are drawn to do right by being praised when they do it, rather than driven by being blamed when they do not.

Right across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy, a pretty little creature, with not a tithe of her moral worth,—a merry, pleasure-loving woman, of no particular force of principle, whose great object in life is to avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.

Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her children, her servants, merely because it is her nature to say pleasant things to every one. It is a mere tact of pleasing, which she uses without knowing it. While Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs her keen eye over everything, and at last brings up with, “Jane, look at that black spot on the salt-spoon! I am astonished at your carelessness!"—Mrs. Easy would say, “Why, Jane, where did you learn to set a table so nicely? All looking beautifully, except,—ah! let’s see,—just give a rub to this salt-spoon;—now all is quite perfect.” Mrs. Standfast’s servants and children hear only of their failures; these are always before them and her. Mrs. Easy’s servants hear of their successes. She praises their good points; tells them they are doing well in this, that, and the other particular; and finally exhorts them, on the strength of having done so many things well, to improve in what is yet lacking. Mrs. Easy’s husband feels that he is always a hero in her eyes, and her children feel that they are dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs. Easy sometimes has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds roundly when something falls out as it should not.

The two families show how much more may be done by a very ordinary woman, through the mere instinct of praising and pleasing, than by the greatest worth, piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a lever that never was meant to lift it by.

The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our virtues in the best light, and put our faults in the background?

Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that are in us,—the needs, the wants, the despondencies,—are in each of our fellows, in every awkward servant and careless child.

Finally, let us all resolve,—

First, to attain to the grace of SILENCE.

Second, to deem all FAULT-FINDING that does no good a SIN; and to resolve, when we are happy ourselves, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling on them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature of their daily life.

Third, to practise the grace and virtue of PRAISE. We have all been taught that it is our duty to praise God, but few of us have reflected on our duty to praise men; and yet for the same reason that we should praise the divine goodness it is our duty to praise human excellence.

We should praise our friends,—our near and dear ones; we should look on and think of their virtues till their faults fade away; and when we love most, and see most to love, then only is the wise time wisely to speak of what should still be altered.

Parents should look out for occasions to commend their children, as carefully as they seek to reprove their faults; and employers should praise the good their servants do as strictly as they blame the evil.

Whoever undertakes to use this weapon will find that praise goes farther in many cases than blame. Watch till a blundering servant does something well, and then praise him for it, and you will see a new fire lighted in the eye, and often you will find that in that one respect at least you have secured excellence thenceforward.

When you blame, which should be seldom, let it be alone with the person, quietly, considerately, and with all the tact you are possessed of. The fashion of reproving children and servants in the presence of others cannot be too much deprecated. Pride, stubbornness, and self-will are aroused by this, while a more private reproof might be received with thankfulness.

As a general rule, I would say, treat children in these respects just as you would grown people; they are grown people in miniature, and need as careful consideration of their feelings as any of us.

Lastly, let us all make a bead-roll, a holy rosary, of all that is good and agreeable in our position, our surroundings, our daily lot, of all that is good and agreeable in our friends, our children, our servants, and charge ourselves to repeat it daily, till the habit of our minds be to praise and to commend; and so doing, we shall catch and kill one Little Fox who hath destroyed many tender grapes.

II.
IRRITABILITY.

IT was that Christmas-day that did it; I’m quite convinced of that; and the way it was is, what I am going to tell you.

You see, among the various family customs of us Crowfields, the observance of all sorts of fêtes and festivals has always been a matter of prime regard; and among all the festivals of the round ripe year, none is so joyous and honored among us as Christmas.

Let no one upon this prick up the ears of Archæology, and tell us that by the latest calculations of chronologists our ivy-grown and holly-mantled Christmas is all a hum,—that it has been demonstrated, by all sorts of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates did not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing it be so, what have we to do with that? If so awful, so joyous an event ever took place on our earth, it is surely worth commemoration. It is the event we celebrate, not the time. And if all Christians for eighteen hundred years, while warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have agreed to give this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is he that shall gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on the friendly greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of re-writing Milton’s Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and Hopkins.

In our house, however, Christmas has always been a high day, a day whose expectation has held waking all the little eyes in our bird’s nest, when as yet there were only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye open, hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christmas and grasp the wonderful stocking.

This year our whole family train of married girls and boys, with the various toddling tribes thereto belonging, held high festival around a wonderful Christmas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had kept my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week beforehand. If the little folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as little about them as they do about most of the other blessings which rain down on their dear little thoughtless heads. Such scrambling and clambering and fussing and tying and untying, such alterations and rearrangements, such agilities in getting up and down and everywhere to tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things innumerable, to hang airy dolls in graceful positions, to make branches bear stiffly up under loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward!

Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity,—the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom’s new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some contumacious taper that would turn slantwise or crosswise, or anywise but upward, as a Christian taper should,—regardless of Mrs. Crowfield’s gentle admonitions and suggestions, sitting up to most dissipated hours, springing out of bed suddenly to change some arrangement in the middle of the night, and up long before the lazy sun at dawn to execute still other arrangements. If that Christmas-tree had been a fort to be taken, or a campaign to be planned, I could not have spent more time and strength on it. My zeal so far outran even that of sprightly Miss Jennie, that she could account for it only by saucily suggesting that papa must be fast getting into his second childhood.

But didn’t we have a splendid lighting-up? Didn’t I and my youngest grandson, little Tom, head the procession magnificent in paper soldier-caps, blowing tin trumpets and beating drums, as we marched round the twinkling glories of our Christmas-tree, all glittering with red and blue and green tapers, and with a splendid angel on top with great gold wings, the cutting-out and adjusting of which had held my eyes waking for nights before? I had had oceans of trouble with that angel, owing to an unlucky sprain in his left wing, which had required constant surgical attention through the week, and which I feared might fall loose again at the important and blissful moment of exhibition: but no, the Fates were in our favor; the angel behaved beautifully, and kept his wings as crisp as possible, and the tapers all burned splendidly, and the little folks were as crazy with delight as my most ardent hopes could have desired; and then we romped and played and frolicked as long as little eyes could keep open, and long after; and so passed away our Christmas.

I had forgotten to speak of the Christmas-dinner, that solid feast of fat things, on which we also luxuriated. Mrs. Crowfield outdid all household traditions in that feast: the turkey and the chickens, the jellies and the sauces, the pies and the pudding, behold, are they not written in the tablets of Memory which remain to this day?

The holidays passed away hilariously, and at New-Year’s I, according to time-honored custom, went forth to make my calls and see my fair friends, while my wife and daughters stayed at home to dispense the hospitalities of the day to their gentlemen friends. All was merry, cheerful, and it was agreed on all hands that a more joyous holiday season had never flown over us.

But, somehow, the week after, I began to be sensible of a running-down in the wheels. I had an article to write for the “Atlantic,” but felt mopish and could not write. My dinner had not its usual relish, and I had an indefinite sense everywhere of something going wrong. My coal bill came in, and I felt sure we were being extravagant, and that our John Furnace wasted the coal. My grandsons and granddaughters came to see us, and I discovered that they had high-pitched voices, and burst in without wiping their shoes, and it suddenly occurred powerfully to my mind that they were not being well brought up,—evidently, they were growing up rude and noisy. I discovered several tumblers and plates with the edges chipped, and made bitter reflections on the carelessness of Irish servants;—our crockery was going to destruction, along with the rest. Then, on opening one of my paper-drawers, I found that Jennie’s one drawer of worsted had overflowed into two or three; Jennie was growing careless; besides, worsted is dear, and girls knit away small fortunes, without knowing it, on little duds that do nobody any good. Moreover, Maggie had three times put my slippers into the hall-closet, instead of leaving them where I wanted, under my study-table. Mrs. Crowfield ought to look after things more; every servant, from end to end of the house, was getting out of the traces, it was strange she did not see it.

All this I vented, from time to time, in short, crusty sayings and doings, as freely as if I hadn’t just written an article on “Little Foxes” in the last “Atlantic,” till at length my eyes were opened on my own state and condition.

It was evening, and I had just laid up the fire in the most approved style of architecture, and, projecting my feet into my slippers, sat spitefully cutting the leaves of a caustic review.

Mrs. Crowfield took the tongs and altered the disposition of a stick.

“My dear,” I said, “I do wish you’d let the fire alone,—you always put it out.”

“I was merely admitting a little air between the sticks,” said my wife.

“You always make matters worse, when you touch the fire.”

As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame darted up between the sticks, and the fire began chattering and snapping defiance at me. Now, if there’s anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be jeered and snapped at in that way by a man’s own fire. It’s an unbearable impertinence. I threw out my leg impatiently, and hit Rover, who yelped a yelp that finished the upset of my nerves. I gave him a hearty kick, that he might have something to yelp for, and in the movement upset Jennie’s embroidery-basket.

“Oh, papa!”

“Confound your baskets and balls! they are everywhere, so that a man can’t move; useless, wasteful things, too.”

“Wasteful?” said Jennie, coloring indignantly; for if there’s anything Jennie piques herself upon, it’s economy.

“Yes, wasteful,—wasting time and money both. Here are hundreds of shivering poor to be clothed, and Christian females sit and do nothing but crochet worsted into useless knicknacks. If they would be working for the poor, there would be some sense in it. But it’s all just alike, no real Christianity in the world, nothing but organized selfishness and self-indulgence.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Crowfield, “you are not well to-night. Things are not quite so desperate as they appear. You haven’t got over Christmas-week.”

“I am well. Never was better. But I can see, I hope, what’s before my eyes; and the fact is, Mrs. Crowfield, things must not go on as they are going. There must be more care, more attention to details. There’s Maggie,—that girl never does what she is told. You are too slack with her, Ma’am. She will light the fire with the last paper, and she won’t put my slippers in the right place; and I can’t have my study made the general catch-all and menagerie for Rover and Jennie, and her baskets and balls, and for all the family litter.”

Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from Jennie, who was swelling with repressed indignation at my attack on her worsted. She sat with her back to me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but very decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn,—

“Now if I should talk in that way, people would call me cross,—and that’s the whole of it.”

I pretended to be looking into the fire in an absent-minded state; but Jennie’s words had started a new idea. Was that it? Was that the whole matter? Was it, then, a fact, that the house, the servants, Jennie and her worsteds, Rover and Mrs. Crowfield, were all going on pretty much as usual, and that the only difficulty was that I was cross? How many times had I encouraged Rover to lie just where he was lying when I kicked him! How many times, in better moods, had I complimented Jennie on her neat little fancy-works, and declared that I liked the social companionship of ladies’ work-baskets among my papers! Yes, it was clear. After all, things were much as they had been; only I was cross.

Cross. I put it to myself in that simple, old-fashioned word, instead of saying that I was out of spirits, or nervous, or using any of the other smooth phrases with which we good Christians cover up our little sins of temper. “Here you are, Christopher,” said I to myself, “a literary man, with a somewhat delicate nervous organization and a sensitive stomach, and you have been eating like a sailor or a ploughman; you have been gallivanting and merry-making and playing the boy for two weeks; up at all sorts of irregular hours, and into all sorts of boyish performances; and the consequence is, that, like a thoughtless young scapegrace, you have used up in ten days the capital of nervous energy that was meant to last you ten weeks. You can’t eat your cake and have it too, Christopher. When the nervous-fluid, source of cheerfulness, giver of pleasant sensations and pleasant views, is all spent, you can’t feel cheerful; things cannot look as they did when you were full of life and vigor. When the tide is out, there is nothing but unsightly, ill-smelling tide-mud, and you can’t help it; but you can keep your senses,—you can know what is the matter with you,—you can keep from visiting your overdose of Christmas mincepies and candies and jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Rover, and Jennie, whether in the form of virulent morality, pungent criticisms, or a free kick, such as you just gave the poor brute.”

“Come here, Rover, poor dog!” said I, extending my hand to Rover, who cowered at the farther corner of the room, eying me wistfully,—“come here, you poor doggie, and make up with your master. There, there! Was his master cross? Well, he knows it. We must forgive and forget, old boy, mustn’t we?” And Rover nearly broke his own back and tore me to pieces with his tumultuous tail-waggings.

“As for you, puss,” I said to Jennie, “I am much obliged to you for your free suggestion. You must take my cynical moralities for what they are worth, and put your little traps into as many of my drawers as you like.”

In short, I made it up handsomely all around,—even apologizing to Mrs. Crowfield, who, by the by, has summered and wintered me so many years, and knows all my little seams and crinkles so well, that she took my irritable, unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I had been a baby cutting a new tooth.

“Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was; don’t disturb yourself,” she said, as I began my apology; “we understand each other. But there is one thing I have to say; and that is, that your article ought to be ready.”

“Ah, well, then,” said I, “like other great writers, I shall make capital of my own sins, and treat of the second little family fox; and his name is—

IRRITABILITY.

Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit. In fact, it comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive of even an angelic spirit confined in a body thus disordered as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.

Then, again, there are other people who go through life loving and beloved, desired in every circle, held up in the Church as examples of the power of religion, who, after all, deserve no credit for these things. Their spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so cheerful, all the sensations which come to them are so fresh and vigorous and pleasant, that they cannot help viewing the world charitably and seeing everything through a glorified medium. The ill-temper of others does not provoke them; perplexing business never sets their nerves to vibrating; and all their lives long they walk in the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.

Look at Rover there. He is never nervous, never cross, never snaps or snarls, and is ready, the moment after the grossest affront, to wag the tail of forgiveness,—all because kind Nature has put his dog’s body together so that it always works harmoniously. If every person in the world were gifted with a stomach and nerves like his, it would be a far better and happier world, no doubt. The man said a good thing who made the remark, that the foundation of all intellectual and moral worth must be laid in a good healthy animal.

Now I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over, will see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing morning to find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by bright sunshine and we are fortunate individuals.

The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we cannot ward them off.

Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find abundant rules for the government of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cart-loads of wholesome instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.

Now, without running into technical, physiological language, it is evident, as regards us human beings, that there is a power by which we live and move and have our being,—by which the brain thinks and wills, the stomach digests, the blood circulates, and all the different provinces of the little man-kingdom do their work. This something—call it nervous fluid, nervous power, vital energy, life-force, or anything else that you will—is a perfectly understood, if not a definable thing. It is plain, too, that people possess this force in very different degrees; some generating it as a high pressure engine does steam, and using it constantly, with an apparently inexhaustible flow and others who have little, and spend it quickly. We have a common saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous irritable states of temper are the mere physics’ result of a used-up condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy,—like a man who should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used up to the loss and detriment of the rest. Thus, with men of letters, an exorbitant brain expends on its own wreckings what belongs to the other offices of the body: the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion; the secretions are badly made; and the imperfectly assimilated nourishment, that is conveyed to every little nerve and tissue, carries with it an acrid, irritating quality, producing general restlessness and discomfort. So men and women go struggling on through their threescore and ten years, scarcely one in a thousand knowing through life that perfect balance of parts, that appropriate harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly animal condition, predisposing to cheerfulness and good-will.

We Americans are, in the first place, a nervous, excitable people. Multitudes of children, probably the great majority in the upper walks of life, are born into the world with weaknesses of the nervous organization, or of the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of any strong excitement or prolonged exertion without some lesion or derangement; so that they are continually being checked, laid up, and made invalids in the midst of their days. Life here in America is so fervid, so fast, our climate is so stimulating, with its clear, bright skies, its rapid and sudden changes of temperature, that the tendencies to nervous disease are constantly aggravated.

Under these circumstances, unless men and women make a conscience, a religion, of saving and sparing something of themselves expressly for home-life and home-consumption, it must follow that home will often be merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and irritable.

Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives all day in his business, putting into it all there is in him, letting it drink up brain and nerve and body and soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so that he cannot bear the cry of the baby, and the frolics and pattering of the nursery seem horrid and needless confusion. The little ones say, in their plain vernacular, “Papa is cross.”

Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one or two in the morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible food, and the next day is so nervous that every straw and thread in her domestic path is insufferable.

Papas that pursue business thus day after day, and mammas that go into company, as it is called, night after night, what is there left in or of them to make an agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and inspire their children?

True, the man says he cannot help himself,—business requires it. But what is the need of rolling up money at the rate at which he is seeking to do it? Why not have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and cheer up his wife, and form the minds of his children? Why spend himself down to the last drop on the world, and give to the dearest friends he has only the bitter dregs?

Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the Church have levelled at fashionable amusements has failed of any effect at all, because wrongly put. A cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example, and all for reasons that will not, in the least, bear looking into. It is vain to talk of dancing as a sin because practised in a dying world where souls are passing into eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is playing marbles, or frolicking with one’s children, or enjoying a good dinner, or doing fifty other things which nobody ever dreamed of objecting to.

If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin which uses up the strength we need for daily duties, and leaves us fagged out and irritable at just those times and in just those places when and where we need most to be healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would say a thing that none of his hearers would dispute. If he should add, that dancing-parties, beginning at ten o’clock at night and ending at four o’clock in the morning, do use up the strength, weaken the nerves, and leave a person wholly unfit for any home duty, he would also be saying what very few people would deny; and then his case would be made out. If he should say that it is wrong to breathe bad air and fill the stomach with unwholesome dainties, so as to make one restless, ill-natured, and irritable for days, he would also say what few would deny, and his preaching might have some hope of success.

The true manner of judging of the worth of amusements is to try them by their effects on the nerves and spirits the day after. True amusement ought to be, as the word indicates, recreation,—something that refreshes, turns us out anew, rests the mind and body by change, and gives cheerfulness and alacrity to our return to duty.

The true objection to all stimulants, alcoholic and narcotic, consists simply in this,—that they are a form of overdraft on the nervous energy, which helps us to use up in one hour the strength of whole days.

A man uses up all the fair, legal interest of nervous power by too much business, too much care, or too much amusement. He has now a demand to meet. He has a complicate account to make up, an essay or a sermon to write, and he primes himself by a cup of coffee, a cigar, a glass of spirits. This is exactly the procedure of a man who, having used the interest of his money, begins to dip into the principal. The strength a man gets in this way is just so much taken out of his life-blood; it is borrowing of a merciless creditor, who will exact, in time, the pound of flesh nearest his heart.

Much of the irritability which spoils home happiness is the letting-down from the over-excitement of stimulus. Some will drink coffee, when they own every day that it makes them nervous; some will drug themselves with tobacco, and some with alcohol, and, for a few hours of extra brightness, give themselves and their friends many hours when amiability or agreeableness is quite out of the question. There are people calling themselves Christians who live in miserable thraldom, forever in debt to Nature, forever overdrawing on their just resources, and using up their patrimony, because they have not the moral courage to break away from a miserable appetite.

The same may be said of numberless indulgences of the palate, which tax the stomach beyond its power, and bring on all the horrors of indigestion. It is almost impossible for a confirmed dyspeptic to act like a good Christian; but a good Christian ought not to become a confirmed dyspeptic. Reasonable self-control, abstaining from all unseasonable indulgence, may prevent or put an end to dyspepsia, and many suffer and make their friends suffer only because they will persist in eating what they know is hurtful to them.

But it is not merely in worldly business, or fashionable amusements, or the gratification of appetite, that people are tempted to overdraw and use up in advance their life-force. It is done in ways more insidious, because connected with our moral and religious faculties. There are religious exaltations beyond the regular pulse and beatings of ordinary nature, that quite as surely gravitate downward into the mire of irritability. The ascent to the third heaven lets even the Apostle down to a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him.

It is the temptation of natures in which the moral faculties predominate to overdo in the outward expression and activities of religion till they are used up and irritable, and have no strength left to set a good example in domestic life.

The Reverend Mr. X. in the pulpit to-day appears with the face of an angel; he soars away into those regions of exalted devotion where his people can but faintly gaze after him; he tells them of the victory that overcometh the world, of an unmoved faith that fears no evil, of a serenity of love that no outward event can ruffle; and all look after him and wonder, and wish they could so soar.

Alas! the exaltation which inspires these sublime conceptions, these celestial ecstasies, is a double and treble draft on Nature,—and poor Mrs. X. knows, when she hears him preaching, that days of miserable reaction are before her. He has been a fortnight driving before a gale of strong excitement, doing all the time twice or thrice as much as in his ordinary state he could, and sustaining himself by the stimulus of strong coffee. He has preached or exhorted every night, and conversed with religious inquirers every day, seeming to himself to become stronger and stronger, because every day more and more excitable and excited. To his hearers, with his flushed sunken cheek and his glittering eye, he looks like some spiritual being just trembling on his flight for upper worlds; but to poor Mrs. X., whose husband he is, things wear a very different aspect. Her woman and mother instincts tell her that he is drawing on his life-capital with both hands, and that the hours of a terrible settlement must come, and the days of darkness will be many. He who spoke so beautifully of the peace of a soul made perfect will not be able to bear the cry of his baby or the pattering feet of any of the poor little X.s, who must be sent

“Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of his sight”;

he who discoursed so devoutly of perfect trust in God will be nervous about the butcher’s bill, sure of going to ruin because both ends of the salary don’t meet; and he who could so admiringly tell of the silence of Jesus under provocation will but too often speak unadvisedly with his lips. Poor Mr. X. will be morally insane for days or weeks, and absolutely incapable of preaching Christ in the way that is the most effective, by setting Him forth in his own daily example.

What then? must we not do the work of the Lord?

Yes, certainly; but the first work of the Lord, that for which provision is to be made in the first place, is to set a good example as a Christian man. Better labor for years steadily, diligently, doing every day only what the night’s rest can repair, avoiding those cheating stimulants that overtax Nature, and illustrating the sayings of the pulpit by the daily life in the family, than to pass life in exaltations and depressions, resulting from overstrained labors, supported by unnatural stimulus.

The same principles apply to hearers as to preachers. Religious services must be judged of like amusements, by their effect on the life. If an overdose of prayers, hymns, and sermons leaves us tired, nervous, and cross, it is only not quite as bad as an overdose of fashionable folly.

It could be wished that in every neighborhood there might be one or two calm, sweet, daily services which should morning and evening unite for a few solemn moments the hearts of all as in one family, and feed with a constant, unnoticed, daily supply the lamp of faith and love. Such are some of the daily prayer-meetings which for eight or ten years past have held their even tenor in some of our New England cities, and such the morning and evening services which we are glad to see obtaining in the Episcopal churches. Everything which brings religion into habitual contact with life, and makes it part of a healthy, cheerful average living, we hail as a sign of a better day. Nothing is so good for health as daily devotion. It is the best soother of the nerves, the best antidote to care; and we trust erelong that all Christian people will be of one mind in this, and that neighborhoods will be families gathering daily around one altar, praying not for themselves merely, but for each other.

The conclusion of the whole matter is this: Set apart some provision to make merry with at home, and guard that reserve as religiously as the priests guarded the shew-bread in the temple. However great you are, however good, however wide the general interests that you may control, you gain nothing by neglecting home-duties. You must leave enough of yourself to be able to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a source of life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The great sign given by the Prophets of the coming of the Millennium is,—what do you suppose?—“He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states.

But it still remains that a large number of people will be subject to them unavoidably for these reasons.

First. The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred stimulants, for so many generations, has vitiated the brain and nervous system of modern civilized races so that it is not what it was in former times. Michelet treats of this subject quite at large in some of his late works; and we have to face the fact of a generation born with an impaired nervous organization, who will need constant care and wisdom to avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation.

There is a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs,—a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,—an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though accompanied often with the greatest talents. Sometimes, too, it is the unfortunate lot of those who have not talents, who bear its burdens and its anguish without its rewards.

People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which they have to do.

Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache, to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and ruin.

The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man once knows that he has it and recognizes it for a disease, and when he does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as the ravings of fever.

A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts that infest his soul.

A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods, once said to me, “My dear sir, there are times when I know I am possessed of the Devil, and then I never let myself speak.” And so this wise woman carried her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful reticence, leaving always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper, when, if she had spoken out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her morbid hours, she would have driven all her friends from her, and made others as miserable as she was herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving presence in every family, by the power of self-knowledge and self-control. Such victories as this are the victories of real saints.

But if the victim of these glooms is once tempted to lift their heavy load by the use of any stimulus whatever, he or she is a lost man or woman. It is from this sad class more than any other that the vast army of drunkards and opium-eaters is recruited. Dr. Johnson, one of the most brilliant examples of the hypochondriac temperament which literature affords, has expressed a characteristic of the race, in what he says of himself, that he could “practise ABSTINENCE but not TEMPERANCE.” Hypochondriacs who begin to rely on stimulus, almost without exception find this to be true. They cannot, they will not be moderate. Whatever stimulant they take for relief will create an uncontrollable appetite, a burning passion. The temperament itself lies in the direction of insanity. It needs the most healthful, careful, even regimen and management to keep it within the bounds of soundness; but the introduction of stimulants deepens its gloom with the shadows of utter despair.

All parents, in the education of their children, should look out for and understand the signs of this temperament. It appears in early childhood; and a child inclined to fits of depression should be marked as a subject of the most thoughtful, painstaking physical and moral training. All over-excitement and stimulus should be carefully avoided, whether in the way of study, amusement, or diet. Judicious education may do much to mitigate the unavoidable pains and penalties of this most undesirable inheritance.

The second class of persons who need wisdom in the control of their moods is that large class whose unfortunate circumstances make it impossible for them to avoid constantly overdoing and overdrawing upon their nervous energies, and who therefore are always exhausted and worn out. Poor souls, who labor daily under a burden too heavy for them, and whose fretfulness and impatience are looked upon with sorrow, not anger, by pitying angels. Poor mothers, with families of little children clinging round them, and a baby that never lets them sleep; hard-working men, whose utmost toil, day and night, scarcely keeps the wolf from the door; and all the hard-laboring, heavy-laden, on whom the burdens of life press far beyond their strength.

There are but two things we know of for these,—two only remedies for the irritation that comes of these exhaustions; the habit of silence towards men, and of speech towards God. The heart must utter itself or burst; but let it learn to commune constantly and intimately with One always present and always sympathizing. This is the great, the only safeguard against fretfulness and complaint. Thus and thus only can peace spring out of confusion, and the breaking chords of an overtaxed nature be strung anew to a celestial harmony.

III.
REPRESSION.

I AM going now to write on another cause of family unhappiness, more subtile than either of those before enumerated.

In the General Confession of the Church, we poor mortals all unite in saying two things: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” These two heads exhaust the subject of human frailty.

It is the things left undone which we ought to have done, the things left unsaid which we ought to have said, that constitute the subject I am now to treat of.

I remember my school-day speculations over an old “Chemistry” I used to study as a textbook, which informed me that a substance called Caloric exists in all bodies. In some it exists in a latent state: it is there, but it affects neither the senses nor the thermometer. Certain causes develop it, when it raises the mercury and warms the hands. I remember the awe and wonder with which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount of blind, deaf, and dumb comfort which Nature had thus stowed away. How mysterious it seemed to me that poor families every winter should be shivering, freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent caloric locked up in her store-closet,—when it was all around them, in everything they touched and handled!

In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.

Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a snow-storm, sit at work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and, suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long for a shawl or cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be complained of,—it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper thing,—the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an angel.

Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many natures, which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they ought to be warm,—whose life is cold and barren and meagre,—which never see the blaze of an open fire.

I will illustrate my meaning by a page out of my own experience.

I was twenty-one when I stood as groomsman for my youngest and favorite sister Emily. I remember her now as she stood at the altar,—a pale, sweet, flowery face, in a half-shimmer between smiles and tears, looking out of vapory clouds of gauze and curls and all the vanishing mysteries of a bridal morning.

Everybody thought the marriage such a fortunate one!—for her husband was handsome and manly, a man of worth, of principle good as gold and solid as adamant,—and Emmy had always been such a flossy little kitten of a pet, so full of all sorts of impulses, so sensitive and nervous, we thought her kind, strong, composed, stately husband made just on purpose for her. “It was quite a Providence,” sighed all the elderly ladies, who sniffed tenderly, and wiped their eyes, according to approved custom, during the marriage ceremony.

I remember now the bustle of the day,—the confused whirl of white gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bride-cakes, the losing of trunk-keys and breaking of lacings, the tears of mamma—God bless her!—and the jokes of irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him, see nothing so very dismal in the whole phantasmagoria, and only wished he were as well off himself.

And so Emmy was whirled away from us on the bridal tour, when her letters came back to us almost every day, just like herself, merry, frisky little bits of scratches,—as full of little nonsense-beads as a glass of Champagne, and all ending with telling us how perfect he was, and how good, and how well he took care of her, and how happy, etc., etc.

Then came letters from her new home. His house was not yet built; but while it was building, they were to live with his mother, who was “such a good woman,” and his sisters, who were also “such nice women.”

But somehow, after this, a change came over Emmy’s letters. They grew shorter; they seemed measured in their words; and in place of sparkling nonsense and bubbling outbursts of glee, came anxiously worded praises of her situation and surroundings, evidently written for the sake of arguing herself into the belief that she was extremely happy.

John, of course, was not as much with her now: he had his business to attend to, which took him away all day, and at night he was very tired. Still he was very good and thoughtful of her, and how thankful she ought to be! And his mother was very good indeed, and did all for her that she could reasonably expect,—of course she could not be like her own mamma; and Mary and Jane were very kind,—“in their way,” she wrote, but scratched it out, and wrote over it, “very kind indeed.” They were the best people in the world,—a great deal better than she was; and she should try to learn a great deal from them.

“Poor little Em!” I said to myself, “I am afraid these very nice people are slowly freezing and starving her.” And so, as I was going up into the mountains for a summer tour, I thought I would accept some of John’s many invitations and stop a day or two with them on my way, and see how matters stood. John had been known among us in college as a taciturn fellow, but good as gold. I had gained his friendship by a regular siege, carrying parallel after parallel, till, when I came into the fort at last, I found the treasures worth taking.

I had little difficulty in finding Squire Evans’s house. It was the house of the village,—a true, model, New England house,—a square, roomy, old-fashioned mansion, which stood on a hillside, under a group of great, breezy old elms, whose wide, wind-swung arms arched over it like a leafy firmament. Under this bower the substantial white house, with all its window-blinds closed, with its neat white fences all tight and trim, stood in its faultless green turfy yard, a perfect Pharisee among houses. It looked like a house all finished, done, completed, labelled, and set on a shelf for preservation; but, as is usual with this kind of edifice in our dear New England, it had not the slightest appearance of being lived in, not a door or window open, not a wink or blink of life: the only suspicion of human habitation was the thin, pale-blue smoke from the kitchen-chimney.

And now for the people in the house.

In making a New England visit in winter, was it ever your fortune to be put to sleep in the glacial spare-chamber, that had been kept from time immemorial as a refrigerator for guests,—that room which no ray of daily sunshine and daily living ever warms, whose blinds are closed the whole year round, whose fireplace knows only the complimentary blaze which is kindled a few moments before bedtime in an atmosphere where you can see your breath? Do you remember the process of getting warm in a bed of most faultless material, with linen sheets and pillow-cases, slippery and cold as ice? You did get warm at last, but you warmed your bed by giving out all the heat of your own body.

Such are some families where you visit. They are of the very best quality, like your sheets, but so cold that it takes all the vitality you have to get them warmed up to the talking-point. You think, the first hour after your arrival, that they must have heard some report to your disadvantage, or that you misunderstood your letter of invitation, or that you came on the wrong day; but no, you find in due course that you were invited, you were expected, and they are doing for you the best they know how, and treating you as they suppose a guest ought to be treated.

If you are a warm-hearted, jovial fellow, and go on feeling your way discreetly, you gradually thaw quite a little place round yourself in the domestic circle, till, by the time you are ready to leave, you really begin to think it is agreeable to stay, and resolve that you will come again. They are nice people; they like you; at last you have got to feeling at home with them.

Three months after, you go to see them again, when, lo! there you are, back again just where you were at first. The little spot which you had thawed out is frozen over again, and again you spend all your visit in thawing it and getting your hosts limbered and in a state for comfortable converse.

The first evening that I spent in the wide, roomy front-parlor, with Judge Evans, his wife, and daughters, fully accounted for the change in Emmy’s letters. Rooms, I verily believe, get saturated with the aroma of their spiritual atmosphere; and there are some so stately, so correct, that they would paralyze even the friskiest kitten or the most impudent Scotch terrier. At a glance, you perceive, on entering, that nothing but correct deportment, an erect posture, and strictly didactic conversation is possible there.

The family, in fact, were all eminently didactic, bent on improvement, laboriously useful. Not a good work or charitable enterprise could put forth its head in the neighborhood, of which they were not the support and life. Judge Evans was the stay and staff of the village and township of ——; he bore up the pillars thereof. Mrs. Evans was known in the gates for all the properties and deeds of the virtuous woman, as set forth by Solomon; the heart of her husband did safely trust in her. But when I saw them, that evening, sitting, in erect propriety, in their respective corners each side of the great, stately fireplace, with its tall, glistening brass andirons, its mantel adorned at either end with plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in the middle,—she so collectedly measuring her words, talking in all those well-worn grooves of correct conversation which are designed, as the phrase goes, to “entertain strangers,” and the Misses Evans, in the best of grammar and rhetoric, and in most proper time and way possible, showing themselves for what they were, most high-principled, well-informed, intelligent women,—I set myself to speculate on the cause of the extraordinary sensation of stiffness and restraint which pervaded me, as if I had been dipped in some petrifying spring and was beginning to feel myself slightly crusting over on the exterior.

This kind of conversation is such as admits quite easily of one’s carrying on another course of thought within; and so, as I found myself like a machine, striking in now and then in good time and tune, I looked at Judge Evans, sitting there so serene, self-poised, and cold, and began to wonder if he had ever been a boy, a young man,—if Mrs. Evans ever was a girl,—if he was ever in love with her, and what he did when he was.

I thought of the lock of Emmy’s hair which I had observed in John’s writing-desk in days when he was falling in love with her,—of sun dry little movements in which at awkward moments I had detected my grave and serious gentleman when I had stumbled accidentally upon the pair in moonlight strolls or retired corners,—and wondered whether the models of propriety before me had ever been convicted of any such human weaknesses. Now, to be sure, I could as soon imagine the stately tongs to walk up and kiss the shovel as conceive of any such bygone effusion in those dignified individuals. But how did they get acquainted? how came they ever to be married?

I looked at John, and thought I saw him gradually stiffening and subsiding into the very image of his father. As near as a young fellow of twenty-five can resemble an old one of sixty-two, he was growing to be exactly like him, with the same upright carriage, the same silence and reserve. Then I looked at Emmy: she, too, was changed,—she, the wild little pet, all of whose pretty individualities were dear to us,—that little unpunctuated scrap of life’s poetry, full of little exceptions referable to no exact rule, only to be tolerated under the wide score of poetic license. Now, as she sat between the two Misses Evans, I thought I could detect a bored, anxious expression on her little mobile face,—an involuntary watchfulness and self-consciousness, as if she were trying to be good on some quite new pattern. She seemed nervous about some of my jokes, and her eye went apprehensively to her mother-in-law in the corner; she tried hard to laugh and make things go merrily for me; she seemed sometimes to look an apology for me to them, and then again for them to me. For myself, I felt that perverse inclination to shock people which sometimes comes over one in such situations. I had a great mind to draw Emmy on to my knee and commence a brotherly romp with her, to give John a thump on his very upright back, and to propose to one of the Misses Evans to strike up a waltz, and get the parlor into a general whirl, before the very face and eyes of propriety in the corner: but “the spirits” were too strong for me; I couldn’t do it.

I remembered the innocent, saucy freedom with which Emmy used to treat her John in the days of their engagement,—the little ways, half loving, half mischievous, in which she alternately petted and domineered over him. Now she called him “Mr. Evans,” with an anxious affectation of matronly gravity. Had they been lecturing her into these conjugal proprieties? Probably not. I felt sure, by what I now experienced in myself, that, were I to live in that family one week, all deviations from the one accepted pattern of propriety would fall off, like many-colored sumach-leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting gently chilly. I tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I felt in the air around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic; and then, as a man who is freezing makes desperate efforts to throw off the spell, and finds his brain beginning to turn, so I was beginning to be slightly insane, and was haunted with a desire to say some horribly improper or wicked thing which should start them all out of their chairs. Though never given to profane expressions, I perfectly hankered to let out a certain round, unvarnished, wicked word, which I knew would create a tremendous commotion on the surface of this enchanted mill-pond,—in fact, I was so afraid that I should make some such mad demonstration, that I rose at an early hour and begged leave to retire. Emmy sprang up with apparent relief, and offered to get my candle and marshal me to my room.

When she had ushered me into the chilly hospitality of that stately apartment, she seemed suddenly disenchanted. She set down the candle, ran to me, fell on my neck, nestled her little head under my coat, laughing and crying, and calling me her dear old boy; she pulled my whiskers, pinched my ear, rummaged my pockets, danced round me in a sort of wild joy, stunning me with a volley of questions, without stopping to hear the answer to one of them; in short, the wild little elf of old days seemed suddenly to come back to me, as I sat down and drew her on to my knee.

“It does look so like home to see you, Chris!—dear, dear home!—and the dear old folks! There never, never was such a home!—everybody there did just what they wanted to, didn’t they, Chris?—and we love each other, don’t we?”

“Emmy,” said I, suddenly, and very improperly, “you aren’t happy here.”

“Not happy?” she said, with a half-frightened look,—“what makes you say so? O, you are mistaken. I have everything to make me happy. I should be very unreasonable and wicked, if I were not. I am very, very happy, I assure you. Of course, you know, everybody can’t be like our folks at home. That I should not expect, you know,—people’s ways are different,—but then, when you know people are so good, and all that, why, of course you must be thankful, be happy. It’s better for me to learn to control my feelings, you know, and not give way to impulses. They are all so good here, they never give way to their feelings,—they always do right. O, they are quite wonderful!”

“And agreeable?” said I.

“O Chris, we mustn’t think so much of that. They certainly aren’t pleasant and easy, as people at home are; but they are never cross, they never scold, they always are good. And we oughtn’t to think so much of living to be happy; we ought to think more of doing right, doing our duty, don’t you think so?”

“All undeniable truth, Emmy; but, for all that, John seems stiff as a ramrod, and their front-parlor is like a tomb. You mustn’t let them petrify him.”

Her face clouded over a little.

“John is different here from what he was at our house. He has been brought up differently,—O, entirely differently from what we were; and when he comes back into the old house, the old business, and the old place between his father and mother and sisters, he goes back into the old ways. He loves me all the same, but he does not show it in the same ways, and I must learn, you know, to take it on trust. He is very busy,—works hard all day, and all for me; and mother says women are unreasonable that ask any other proof of love from their husbands than what they give by working for them all the time. She never lectures me, but I know she thought I was a silly little petted child, and she told me one day how she brought up John. She never petted him; she put him away alone to sleep, from the time he was six months old; she never fed him out of his regular hours when he was a baby, no matter how much he cried; she never let him talk baby-talk, or have any baby-talk talked to him, but was very careful to make him speak all his words plain from the very first; she never encouraged him to express his love by kisses or caresses, but taught him that the only proof of love was exact obedience. I remember John’s telling me of his running to her once and hugging her round the neck, when he had come in without wiping his shoes, and she took off his arms and said: ‘My son, this isn’t the best way to show love. I should be much better pleased to have you come in quietly and wipe your shoes than to come and kiss me when you forget to do what I say.’”

“Dreadful old jade!” said I, irreverently, being then only twenty-three.

“Now, Chris, I won’t have anything to say to you, if this is the way you are going to talk,” said Emily, pouting, though a mischievous gleam darted into her eyes. “Really, however, I think she carried things too far, though she is so good. I only said it to excuse John, and show how he was brought up.”

“Poor fellow!” said I. “I know now why he is so hopelessly shut up, and walled up. Never a warmer heart than he keeps stowed away there inside of the fortress, with the drawbridge down and moat all round.”

“They are all warm-hearted inside,” said Emily. “Would you think she didn’t love him? Once when he was sick, she watched with him seventeen nights without taking off her clothes; she scarcely would eat all the time: Jane told me so. She loves him better than she loves herself. It’s perfectly dreadful sometimes to see how intense she is when anything concerns him; it’s her principle that makes her so cold and quiet.”

“And a devilish one it is!” said I.

“Chris, you are really growing wicked!”

“I use the word seriously, and in good faith,” said I. “Who but the Father of Evil ever devised such plans for making goodness hateful, and keeping the most-heavenly part of our nature so under lock and key that for the greater part of our lives we get no use of it? Of what benefit is a mine of love burning where it warms nobody, does nothing but blister the soul within with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows morbid, acts in a thousand perverse ways. These three women, I’ll venture to say, are living in the family here like three frozen islands, knowing as little of each other’s inner life as if parted by eternal barriers of ice,—and all because a cursed principle in the heart of the mother has made her bring them up in violence to Nature.”

“Well,” said Emmy, “sometimes I do pity Jane; she is nearest my age, and, naturally, I think she was something like me, or might have been. The other day I remember her coming in looking so flushed and ill that I couldn’t help asking if she were unwell. The tears came into her eyes; but her mother looked up, in her cool, business-like way, and said, in her dry voice,—

“‘Jane, what’s the matter?’

“‘O, my head aches dreadfully, and I have pains in all my limbs!’

“I wanted to jump and run to do something for her,—you know at our house we feel that a sick person must be waited on,—but her mother only said, in the same dry way,—

“‘Well, Jane, you’ve probably got a cold; go into the kitchen and make yourself some good boneset tea, soak your feet in hot water, and go to bed at once’; and Jane meekly departed.

“I wanted to spring and do these things for her; but it’s curious, in this house I never dare offer to do anything; and mother looked at me, as she went out, with a significant nod,—

“‘That’s always my way; if any of the children are sick, I never coddle them; it’s best to teach them to make as light of it as possible.’”

“Dreadful!” said I.

“Yes, it is dreadful,” said Emmy, drawing her breath, as if relieved that she might speak her mind; “it’s dreadful to see these people, who I know love each other, living side by side and never saying a loving, tender word, never doing a little loving thing,—sick ones crawling off alone like sick animals, persisting in being alone, bearing everything alone. But I won’t let them; I will insist on forcing my way into their rooms. I would go and sit with Jane, and pet her and hold her hand and bathe her head, though I knew it made her horridly uncomfortable at first; but I thought she ought to learn to be petted in a Christian way, when she was sick. I will kiss her too, sometimes, though she takes it just like a cat that isn’t used to being stroked, and calls me a silly girl; but I know she is getting to like it. What is the use of people’s loving each other in this horridly cold, stingy, silent way? If one of them were dangerously ill now, or met with any serious accident, I know there would be no end to what the others would do for her; if one of them were to die, the others would be perfectly crushed: but it would all go inward,—drop silently down into that dark, cold, frozen well; they couldn’t speak to each other; they couldn’t comfort each other; they have lost the power of expression; they absolutely can’t.”

“Yes,” said I, “they are like the fakirs who have held up an arm till it has become stiffened,—they cannot now change its position; like the poor mutes, who, being deaf, have become dumb through disuse of the organs of speech. Their education has been like those iron suits of armor into which little boys were put in the Middle Ages, solid, inflexible, put on in childhood, enlarged with every year’s growth, till the warm human frame fitted the mould as if it had been melted and poured into it. A person educated in this way is hopelessly crippled, never will be what he might have been.”

“O, don’t say that, Chris; think of John; think how good he is.”

“I do think how good he is,"—with indignation,—“and how few know it, too. I think; that, with the tenderest, truest, gentlest heart, the utmost appreciation of human friendship, he has passed in the world for a cold, proud, selfish man. If your frank, impulsive, incisive nature had not unlocked gates and opened doors, he would never have known the love of woman: and now he is but half disenchanted; he every day tends to go back to stone.”

“But I sha’n’t let him; O, indeed, I know the danger! I shall bring him out. I shall work on them all. I know they are beginning to love me a good deal: in the first place, because I belong to John, and everything belonging to him is perfect; and in the second place—”

“In the second place, because they expect to weave, day after day, the fine cobweb lines of their cold system of repression around you, which will harden and harden, and tighten and tighten, till you are as stiff and shrouded as any of them. You remind me of our poor little duck: don’t you remember him?”

“Yes, poor fellow! how he would stay out, and swim round and round, while the pond kept freezing and freezing, and his swimming-place grew smaller and smaller every day; but he was such a plucky little fellow that—”

“That at last we found him one morning frozen tight in, and he has limped ever since on his poor feet.”

“O, but I won’t freeze in,” she said, laughing.

“Take care, Emmy! You are sensitive, approbative, delicately organized; your whole nature inclines you to give way and yield to the nature of those around you. One little lone duck such as you, however warm-blooded, light-hearted, cannot keep a whole pond from freezing. While you have any influence, you must use it all to get John away from these surroundings, where you can have him to yourself.”

“O, you know we are building our house; we shall go to housekeeping soon.”

“Where? Close by, under the very guns of this fortress, where all your housekeeping, all your little management, will be subject to daily inspection.”

“But mamma never interferes, never advises,—unless I ask advice.”

“No, but she influences; she lives, she looks, she is there; and while she is there, and while your home is within a stone’s throw, the old spell will be on your husband, on your children, if you have any; you will feel it in the air; it will constrain, it will sway you, it will rule your house, it will bring up your children.”

“O no! never! never! I never could! I never will! If God should give me a dear little child, I will not let it grow up in these hateful ways!”

“Then, Emmy, there will be a constant, still, undefined, but real friction of your life-power from the silent grating of your wishes and feelings on the cold, positive millstone of their opinion; it will be a life-battle with a quiet, invisible, pervading spirit, who will never show himself in fair fight, but who will be around you in the very air you breathe, at your pillow when you lie down and when you rise. There is so much in these friends of yours noble, wise, severely good,—their aims are so high, their efficiency so great, their virtues so many,—that they will act upon you with the force of a conscience, subduing, drawing, insensibly constraining you into their moulds. They have stronger wills, stronger natures than yours; and between the two forces of your own nature and theirs you will be always oscillating, so that you will never show what you can do, working either in your own way or yet in theirs: your life will be a failure.”

“O Chris, why do you discourage me?”

“I am trying tonic treatment, Emily; I am showing you a real danger; I am rousing you to flee from it. John is making money fast; there is no reason why he should always remain buried in this town. Use your influence as they do,—daily, hourly, constantly,—to predispose him to take you to another sphere. Do not always shrink and yield; do not conceal and assimilate and endeavor to persuade him and yourself that you are happy; do not put the very best face to him on it all; do not tolerate his relapses daily and hourly into his habitual, cold, inexpressive manner; and don’t lay aside your own little impulsive, out-spoken ways. Respect your own nature, and assert it; woo him, argue with him; use all a woman’s weapons to keep him from falling back into the old Castle Doubting where he lived till you let him out. Dispute your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken for granted without daily proof between lovers; cry down latent caloric in the market; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is not enough,—that the words spoken once, years ago, are not enough,—that love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-trees, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers at the root to cover the ground.”

“O, but I have heard that there is no surer way to lose love than to be exacting, and that it never comes for a woman’s reproaches.”

“All true as Gospel, Emmy. I am not speaking of reproaches, or of unreasonable self-assertion, or of ill-temper,—you could not use any of these forces, if you would, you poor little chick! I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred,—that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. Thoughtless, instinctive, unreasoning love and self-sacrifice, such as many women long to bestow on husband and children, soil and lower the very objects of their love. You may grow saintly by self-sacrifice; but do your husband and children grow saintly by accepting it without return? I have seen a verse which says,—

‘They who kneel at woman’s shrine
Breathe on it as they bow.’

Is not this true of all unreasoning love and self-devotion? If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend. Any good man soon learns to discriminate between the remonstrance that comes from a woman’s love to his soul, her concern for his honor, her anxiety for his moral development, and the pettish cry which comes from her own personal wants. It will be your own fault, if, for lack of anything you can do, your husband relapses into these cold, undemonstrative habits which have robbed his life of so much beauty and enjoyment. These dead, barren ways of living are as unchristian as they are disagreeable; and you, as a good little Christian sworn to fight heroically under Christ’s banner, must make headway against this sort of family Antichrist, though it comes with a show of superior sanctity and self-sacrifice. Remember, dear, that the Master’s family had its outward tokens of love as well as its inward life. The beloved leaned on His bosom; and the traitor could not have had a sign for his treachery, had there not been a daily kiss at meeting and parting with His children.”

“I am glad you have said all this,” said Emily, “because now I feel stronger for it. It does not now seem so selfish for me to want what it is better for John to give. Yes, I must seek what will be best for him.”

And so the little one, put on the track of self-sacrifice, began to see her way clearer, as many little women of her sort do. Make them look on self-assertion as one form of martyrdom, and they will come into it.

But, for all my eloquence on this evening, the house was built in the selfsame spot as projected; and the family life went on, under the shadow of Judge Evans’s elms, much as if I had not spoken. Emmy became mother of two fine, lovely boys, and waxed dimmer and fainter; while with her physical decay came increasing need of the rule in the household of mamma and sisters, who took her up energetically on eagles’ wings, and kept her house, and managed her children: for what can be done when a woman hovers half her time between life and death?

At last I spoke out to John, that the climate and atmosphere were too severe for her who had become so dear to him,—to them all; and then they consented that the change much talked of and urged, but always opposed by the parents, should be made.

John bought a pretty cottage in our neighborhood, and brought his wife and boys; and the effect of change of moral atmosphere verified all my predictions. In a year we had our own blooming, joyous, impulsive little Emily once more,—full of life, full of cheer, full of energy,—looking to the ways of her household,—the merry companion of her growing boys,—the blithe empress over her husband, who took to her genial sway as in the old happy days of courtship. The nightmare was past, and John was as joyous as any of us in his freedom. As Emmy said, he was turned right side out for life; and we all admired the pattern. And that is the end of my story.

And now for the moral,—and that is, that life consists of two parts,—Expression and Repression,—each of which has its solemn duties. To love, joy, hope, faith, pity, belongs the duty of expression: to anger, envy, malice, revenge, and all uncharitableness, belongs the duty of repression.

Some very religious and moral people err by applying repression to both classes alike. They repress equally the expression of love and of hatred, of pity and of anger. Such forget one great law, as true in the moral world as in the physical,—that repression lessens and deadens. Twice or thrice mowing will kill off the sturdiest crop of weeds; the roots die for want of expression. A compress on a limb will stop its growing; the surgeon knows this, and puts a tight bandage around a tumor; but what if we put a tight bandage about the heart and lungs, as some young ladies of my acquaintance do,—or bandage the feet, as they do in China? And what if we bandage a nobler inner faculty, and wrap love in grave-clothes?

But again there are others, and their number is legion,—perhaps you and I, reader, may know something of it in ourselves,—who have an instinctive habit of repression in regard to all that is noblest and highest within them, which they do not feel in their lower and more unworthy nature.

It comes far easier to scold our friend in an angry moment than to say how much we love, honor, and esteem him in a kindly mood. Wrath and bitterness speak themselves and go with their own force; love is shame-faced, looks shyly out of the window, lingers long at the door-latch.

How much freer utterance among many good Christians have anger, contempt, and censoriousness, than tenderness and love! I hate is said loud and with all our force. I love is said with a hesitating voice and blushing cheek.

In an angry mood we do an injury to a loving heart with good, strong, free emphasis; but we stammer and hang back when our diviner nature tells us to confess and ask pardon. Even when our heart is broken with repentance, we haggle and linger long before we can

“Throw away the worser part of it.”

How many live a stingy and niggardly life in regard to their richest inward treasures! They live with those they love dearly, whom a few more words and deeds expressive of this love would make so much happier, richer, and better; and they cannot, will not, turn the key and give it out. People who in their very souls really do love, esteem, reverence, almost worship each other, live a barren, chilly life side by side, busy, anxious, preoccupied, letting their love go by as a matter of course, a last year’s growth, with no present buds and blossoms.

Are there not sons and daughters who have parents living with them as angels unawares,—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, in whom the material for a beautiful life lies locked away in unfruitful silence,—who give time to everything but the cultivation and expression of mutual love?

The time is coming, they think, in some far future, when they shall find leisure to enjoy each other, to stop and rest side by side, to discover to each other these hidden treasures which lie idle and unused.

Alas! time flies and death steals on, and we reiterate the complaint of one in Scripture,—“It came to pass, while thy servant was busy hither and thither, the man was gone.”

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. “She never knew how I loved her.” “He never knew what he was to me.” “I always meant to make more of our friendship.” “I did not know what he was to me till he was gone.” Such words are the poisoned arrows which cruel Death shoots backward at us from the door of the sepulchre.

How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed! We are not now speaking merely of personal caresses. These may or may not be the best language of affection. Many are endowed with a delicacy, a fastidiousness of physical organization, which shrinks away from too much of these, repelled and overpowered. But there are words and looks and little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, which speak of love, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a family that might not be richer in heart-wealth for more of them.

It is a mistake to suppose that relations must of course love each other because they are relations. Love must be cultivated, and can be increased by judicious culture, as wild fruits may double their bearing under the hand of a gardener; and love can dwindle and die out by neglect, as choice flower-seeds planted in poor soil dwindle and grow single.

Two causes in our Anglo-Saxon nature prevent this easy faculty and flow of expression which strike one so pleasantly in the Italian or the French life: the dread of flattery, and a constitutional shyness.