choice between rubies and living coals, and your
influence will have much to do with his decision. He may not, like
Moses, be the deliverer of a nation, but he may, after your father and
mother are gone, be the deliverer of a household. What thousands of
homes to-day are piloted by brothers! There are properties now well
invested and yielding income for the support of sisters and younger
brothers, because the older brother rose to the leadership from the
day the father laid down to die. Whatever you do for your brother will
come back to you again. If you set him an ill-natured, censorious,
unaccommodating example, it will recoil upon you from his own
irritated and despoiled nature. If you, by patience with all his
infirmities and by nobility of character, dwell with him in the few
years of your companionship, you will have your counsels reflected
back upon you some day by his splendor of behavior in some crisis
where he would have failed but for you.

TEASING A FAMILY CURSE.

Don't snub him. Don't depreciate his ability. Don't talk
discouragingly about his future. Don't let Miriam get down off the
bank of the Nile, and wade out and upset the ark of bulrushes. Don't
tease him. Brothers and sisters do not consider it any harm to tease.
That spirit abroad in the family is one of the meanest and most
devilish. There is a teasing that is pleasurable, and is only another
form of innocent raillery, but that which provokes, and irritates, and
makes the eye flash with anger is to be reprehended. It would be less
blameworthy to take a bunch of thorns and draw them across your
sister's cheek, or to take a knife and draw its sharp edge across your
brother's hand till the blood spurts, for that would damage only the
body, but teasing is the thorn and the knife, scratching and
lacerating the disposition and the soul. It is the curse of
innumerable households that the brothers tease the sisters, and the
sisters the brothers. Sometimes it is the color of the hair, or the
shape of the features, or an affair of the heart. Sometimes it is by
revealing a secret, or by a suggestive look, or a guffaw, or an
"Ahem!" Tease! Tease! Tease! For God's sake quit it. Christ says: "He
that hateth his brother is a murderer." Now, when you, by teasing,
make your brother or sister hate you, you turn him or her into a
murderer or murderess.

BEWARE OF JEALOUSY.

Don't let jealousy ever touch a sister's soul, as it so often does,
because her bro