long as the hour of assembling around the family table is
something to be looked forward to as a comfort and a refreshment, a
man cannot see that the good house fairy, who by some magic keeps
everything so delightfully, has either a wrinkle or a gray hair."

"Besides," said I, "I must tell you, Rudolph, what you fellows of
twenty-one are slow to believe; and that is, that the kind of ideal
paradise you propose in marriage is, in the very nature of things, an
impossibility,--that the familiarities of every-day life between two
people who keep house together must and will destroy it. Suppose you
are married to Cytherea herself, and the next week attacked with a
rheumatic fever. If the tie between you is that of true and honest
love, Cytherea will put on a gingham wrapper, and with her own
sculptured hands wring out the flannels which shall relieve your
pains; and she will be no true woman if she do not prefer to do this
to employing any nurse that could be hired. True love ennobles and
dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered
for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.

"No true-hearted woman can find herself, in real, actual life,
unskilled and unfit to minister to the wants and sorrows of those
dearest to her, without a secret sense of degradation. The feeling of
uselessness is an extremely unpleasant one. Tom Hood, in a very
humorous paper, describes a most accomplished schoolmistress, a
teacher of all the arts and crafts which are supposed to make up fine
gentlewomen, who is stranded in a rude German inn, with her father
writhing in the anguish of a severe attack of gastric inflammation.
The helpless lady gazes on her suffering parent, longing to help him,
and thinking over all her various little store of accomplishments, not
one of which bears the remotest relation to the case. She could knit
him a bead purse, or make him a guard-chain, or work him a footstool,
or festoon him with cut tissue-paper, or sketch his likeness, or crust
him over with alum crystals, or stick him over with little rosettes of
red and white wafers; but none of these being applicable to his
present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility, till finally she
desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and, after a
laborious turn in the kitchen,--after burning her dress and blacking
her fingers,--succeeds only in bringing him a bowl of paste!

"Not unlike this might be the feeling of many an elega