damsel of the forest, who began by pitching it out of doors, with the
comprehensive remark, that, "where there wasn't room for a thing, there
wasn't."

The wisdom which inspired the remark of this rustic maiden might have
saved the lives of many matrons who have worn themselves out in vain
attempts to make comforts and conveniences out of things which they had
better have thrown out of doors altogether.

True, it requires some judgment to know what, among objects commonly
pursued in any department, we really ought to reject; and it requires
independence and steadiness to say, "I will not begin to try to do
certain things that others are doing, and that, perhaps, they expect of
me"; but there comes great leisure and quietness of spirit from the gaps
thus made. When the unwieldy clothes-press was once cast out, everything
in the log cabin could have room.

A mother, who is anxiously trying to reconcile the watchful care and
training of her little ones with the maintenance of fashionable calls
and parties, may lose her life in the effort to do both, and do both in
so imperfect a manner as never to give her a moment's peace. But on the
morrow after she comes to the serious and Christian resolve, "The
training of my children is all that I _can_ do well, and henceforth it
shall be my _sole_ object," there falls into her tumultuous life a
Sabbath pause of peace and leisure. It is true that she is still doing
a work in which absolute perfection ever recedes; but she can make
relative attainments far nearer the standard than before.

Lastly, under the head of ideality let us resolve to be satisfied with
our own past doings, when at the time of doing we used all the light God
gave us and did all in our power.

The backward action of ideality is often full as tormenting as its
forward and prospective movements. The moment a thing is done and over,
one would think that good sense would lead us to drop it like a stone in
the ocean; but the morbid idealist cannot cut loose from the past.

"Was that, after all, the _best_ thing? Would it not have been better so
or so?" And the self-tormented individual lies wakeful, during weary
night-hours, revolving a thousand possibilities, and conjuring up a
thousand vague perhapses. "If I had only done so now, perhaps this
result would have followed, or that would not"; and as there is never
any saying but that so it might have turned out, the labyrinth and the
discontent are alike endless.