at all. If you are making a new
home you are in harmony with the world about you, and the very earth
itself exhales a vital and sustaining sympathy.

It is not at all necessary that you should be able to provide as good
a house and the furnishings thereof as that from which your wife
comes. Nobody expects you to be as successful in the very beginning of
your life as her father was at the close of his. Least of all does she
herself expect it. And even if this were possible, it is not from such
continuous luxury that the best character is made. The absolute
necessity to economize compels the ordinary young American couple to
learn the value of things--the value of a dollar and the value of
life.

They learn to "know how it comes," again to employ one of the wise
sayings of the common people. And the numberless experiences of their
first few years of comparative hardship are the very things necessary
to bring out in them sweetness, self-sacrifice, and uplifting
hardihood of character. In these sharp experiences, too, there is
greatest happiness. How many hundreds of times have you heard men and
women say of their early married years, "Those were the happiest days
of my life."

As a matter of good business on the one hand, and of sheer felicity on
the other hand, make the ideals of this new home of yours as high as
you possibly can. Don't make them so high that neither you nor any
other human being can live up to them, of course; but if you can put
them a notch beyond those even of the exalted standard of the old
home, by all means do it. Do it, that is, if you can live up to them.

It is remarkable what individual power grows out of clean living. It
is profitable also. The mere business value of a reputation for a high
quality of home life will be one of the best assets that you can
accumulate. "They are attending strictly to business and will make
their mark," said a wise old banker to a group of friends in
discussing a fine type of young business man, and the equally fine
type of the young American woman who was his wife.

I do not know whether that young man was borrowing money for his
business from that particular bank or not, but I do know that he could
borrow it if he wanted it. And one reason why his credit was
established with the money-wise old financier was the ideal home life
which he and his wife were leading.

For, mark you, they were not "living beyond their means." That was the
first thing. That is