nd early
frosts, droughts, winds, and hail-storms here and there for all.

The garden and the family are fair pictures of each other. Both are
capable of the most ravishing representations on paper; and the rules
and directions for creating beauty and perfection in both can be made so
apparently plain that he who runneth may read, and it would seem that a
fool need not err therein; and yet the actual results are always halting
miles away behind expectation and desire.

It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would
begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low
pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand
and expect the least.

Ideality often becomes an insidious mental and moral disease, acting all
the more subtly from its alliances with what is highest and noblest
within us. Shall we not aspire to be perfect? Shall we be content with
low measures and low standards in anything? To these inquiries there
seems of course to be but one answer; yet the individual driven forward
in blind, unreasoning aspiration becomes wearied, bewildered,
discontented, restless, fretful, and miserable.

An unhappy person can never make others happy. The creators and
governors of a home, who are themselves restless and inharmonious,
cannot make harmony and peace. This is the secret reason why many a
pure, good, conscientious person is only a source of uneasiness in
family life. They are exacting, discontented, unhappy; and spread the
discontent and unhappiness about them. They are, to begin with, on poor
terms with themselves; they do not like themselves; they do not like
their own appearance, manners, education, accomplishments; on all these
points they try themselves by ideal standards, and find themselves
wanting. In morals, in religion, too, the same introverted scrutiny
detects only errors and evils, till all life seems to them a miserable,
hopeless failure, and they wish they had never been born. They are angry
and disgusted with themselves; there is no self-toleration or
self-endurance. And persons in a chronic quarrel with themselves are
very apt to quarrel with others. That exacting nature which has no
patience with one's own inevitable frailties and errors has none for
those of others; and thus the great motive by which Christianity
enforces tolerance of the faults of others loses its hold. There are
people who make no allowances either for themselves or