of themselves expressly for
home-life and home-consumption, it must follow that home will often be
merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and
irritable.

Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives all day in his
business, putting into it all there is in him, letting it drink up brain
and nerve and body and soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so
that he cannot bear the cry of the baby, and the frolics and pattering
of the nursery seem horrid and needless confusion. The little ones say,
in their plain vernacular, "Papa is cross."

Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one or two in the
morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible food, and the next day is
so nervous that every straw and thread in her domestic path is
insufferable.

Papas that pursue business thus day after day, and mammas that go into
company, as it is called, night after night, what is there left in or of
them to make an agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and
inspire their children?

True, the man says he cannot help himself,--business requires it. But
what is the need of rolling up money at the rate at which he is seeking
to do it? Why not have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and
cheer up his wife, and form the minds of his children? Why spend himself
down to the last drop on the world, and give to the dearest friends he
has only the bitter dregs?

Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the Church have levelled at
fashionable amusements has failed of any effect at all, because wrongly
put. A cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example, and all for
reasons that will not, in the least, bear looking into. It is vain to
talk of dancing as a sin because practised in a dying world where souls
are passing into eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is
playing marbles, or frolicking with one's children, or enjoying a good
dinner, or doing fifty other things which nobody ever dreamed of
objecting to.

If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin which uses up the
strength we need for daily duties, and leaves us fagged out and
irritable at just those times and in just those places when and where we
need most to be healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would say a
thing that none of his hearers would dispute. If he should add, that
dancing-parties, beginning at ten o'clock at night and ending at four
o'clock in the morning, do use up the stre