ve beautiful things,
make them useful. The fashion of having a nice parlor, and then
shutting it up all but three or four days in the year, when you have
company; spending your own life in a mean room, shabbily furnished, or
an unhealthy basement, to save your things, is the meanest possible
economy. Go a little further--shut up your house, and live in a
pig-pen! The use of nice and beautiful things is to act upon your
spirit--to educate you and make you beautiful.

3. _Another._

Don't put your cards around the looking-glass, unless in your private
boudoir. If you wish to display them, keep them in a suitable basket
or vase on the mantle or center-table.

4. _An Obliging Disposition._

Polite persons are necessarily obliging. A smile is always on their
lips, an earnestness in their countenance, when we ask a favor of
them. They know that to render a service with a bad grace, is in
reality not to render it at all. If they are obliged to refuse a
favor, they do it with mildness and delicacy; they express such
feeling regret that they still inspire us with gratitude; in short,
their conduct appears so perfectly natural that it really seems that
the opportunity which is offered them of obliging us, is obliging
themselves; and they refuse all our thanks, without affectation or
effort.

5. _Securing a Home._

Let me, as a somewhat scrutinizing observer of the varying phases of
social life, in our own country especially, enter my earnest protest
against the practice so commonly adopted by newly-married persons, of
_boarding_, in place of at once establishing for themselves the
distinctive and ennobling prerogatives of HOME. Language and time
would alike fail me in an endeavor to set forth the manifold evils
inevitably growing out of this fashionable system. Take the advice of
an old man, who has tested theories by prolonged experience, and at
once establish your PENATES within four walls, and under a roof that
will, at times, exclude all who are not properly denizens of your
household, upon assuming the rights and obligations of married life.
Do not be deterred from this step by the conviction that you can not
shrine your home deities upon pedestals of marble. _Cover their bases
with flowers_--God's free gift to all--and the plainest support will
suffice for them if it be but _firm_.

6. _Taste vs. Fashion._

A lady should never, on account of economy, wear either what she deems
an ugly or an ungraceful ga