morable visits will be the first and the last. Those two pictures
will hang in the hall of your memory while memory lasts, and you will
remember just how they looked, and where they sat, and what they said,
and at what figure of the carpet, and at what door-sill they parted
with you, giving you the final good-bye. Do not be embarrassed if your
father come to town and he have the manners of the shepherd, and if
your mother come to town and there be in her hat no sign of costly
millinery. The wife of Emperor Theodosius said a wise thing when she
said: "Husband, remember what you lately were, and remember what you
are, and be thankful."

By this time you all notice what

KINDLY PROVISION

Joseph made for his father Jacob. Joseph did not say: "I can't have
the old man around this place. How clumsy he would look climbing up
these marble stairs, and walking over these mosaics! Then, he would be
putting his hands upon some of these frescoes. People would wonder
where that old greenhorn came from. He would shock all the Egyptian
court with his manners at table. Besides that, he might get sick on my
hands, and he might be querulous, and he might talk to me as though I
were only a boy, when I am the second man in all the realm. Of course,
he must not suffer, and if there is famine in his country--and I hear
there is--I will send him some provisions; but I can't take a man from
Padan-aram and introduce him into this polite Egyptian court. What a
nuisance it is to have

POOR RELATIONS!"

Joseph did not say that, but he rushed out to meet his father with
perfect abandon of affection, and brought him up to the palace, and
introduced him to the Emperor, and provided for all the rest of the
father's days, and nothing was too good for the old man while living;
and when he was dead Joseph, with military escort, took his father's
remains to the family cemetery at Machpelah and put them down beside
Rachel, Joseph's mother. Would God all children were as kind to their
parents!

If the father have large property, and he be wise enough to keep it in
his own name, he will be respected by the heirs; but how often it is
when the son finds the father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob in
famine, the young people make it very hard for the old man. They are
so surprised he eats with a knife instead of a fork. They are
chagrined at his antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he
cannot hear as well as he used to, and when he asks it