proclaimed the fall of the
year to be coming on, and cold weather impending. Sunday evenings, my
married boys and girls are fond of coming home and gathering round the
old hearthstone, and "making believe" that they are children again. We
get out the old-fashioned music-books, and sing old hymns to very old
tunes, and my wife and her matron daughters talk about the babies in
the intervals; and we discourse of the sermon, and of the choir, and
all the general outworks of good pious things which Sunday suggests.

"Papa," said Marianne, "you are closing up your 'House and Home
Papers,' are you not?"

"Yes,--I am come to the last one, for this year at least."

"My dear," said my wife, "there is one subject you haven't touched on
yet; you ought not to close the year without it; no house and home can
be complete without Religion: you should write a paper on Home
Religion."

My wife, as you may have seen in these papers, is an old-fashioned
woman, something of a conservative. I am, I confess, rather given
to progress and speculation; but I feel always as if I were going on
in these ways with a string round my waist, and my wife's hand
steadily pulling me back into the old paths. My wife is a steady,
Bible-reading, Sabbath-keeping woman, cherishing the memory of her
fathers, and loving to do as they did,--believing, for the most part,
that the paths well beaten by righteous feet are safest, even
though much walking therein has worn away the grass and flowers.
Nevertheless, she has an indulgent ear for all that gives promise
of bettering anybody or anything, and therefore is not severe on any
new methods that may arise in our progressive days of accomplishing
old good objects.

"There must be a home religion," said my wife.

"I believe in home religion," said Bob Stephens,--"but not in the
outward show of it. The best sort of religion is that which one keeps
at the bottom of his heart, and which goes up thence quietly through
all his actions, and not the kind that comes through a certain routine
of forms and ceremonies. Do you suppose family prayers, now, and a
blessing at meals, make people any better?"

"Depend upon it, Robert," said my wife,--she always calls him Robert
on Sunday evenings,--"depend upon it, we are not so very much wiser
than our fathers were, that we need depart from their good old ways.
Of course I would have religion in the heart, and spreading quietly
through the life; but does this interfere with