e, and may appear in another way behind the scenes, so private
character may be very different from public character. Private
character is often public character turned wrong side out. A man may
receive you into his parlor as though he were a distillation of
smiles, and yet his heart may be a swamp of nettles. There are
business men who all day long are mild, and courteous, and genial, and
good-natured in commercial life, damming back their irritability, and
their petulance, and their discontent; but at nightfall the dam
breaks, and scolding pours forth in floods and freshets.

HOME MANNERS.

Reputation is only the shadow of character, and a very small house
sometimes will cast a very long shadow. The lips may seem to drop with
myrrh and cassia, and the disposition to be as bright and warm as a
sheaf of sunbeams, and yet they may only be a magnificent show window
to a wretched stock of goods. There is many a man who is affable in
public life and amid commercial spheres who, in a cowardly way, takes
his anger and his petulance home, and drops them on the domestic
circle.

The reason men do not display their bad temper in public is because
they do not want to be knocked down. There are men who hide their
petulance and their irritability just for the same reason that they do
not let their notes go to protest. It does not pay. Or for the same
reason that they do not want a man in their stock company to sell his
stock at less than the right price, lest it depreciate the value. As
at some time the wind rises, so after a sunshiny day there may be a
tempestuous night. There are people who in public act the
philanthropist, who at home act the Nero, with respect to their
slippers and their gown.

AUDUBON'S GREATNESS.

Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and pencil, went through
the forests of America to bring down and to sketch the beautiful
birds, and after years of toil and exposure completed his manuscript,
and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia for a few days of recreation and
rest, and came back and found that the rats had utterly destroyed the
manuscript; but without any discomposure and without any fret or bad
temper, he again picked up his gun and pencil, and visited again all
the great forests of America, and reproduced his immortal work. And
yet there are people with the ten thousandth part of that loss who are
utterly unreconcilable, who, at the loss of a pencil or an article of
raiment will blow as lo