four days; but they went in
at last, and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to finish was
happy. He was never demoralized. It is not so with us. We cannot much
distend or contract our purely physical needs. Especially is any
oversupply of them mischievous. They have not the reptilian elasticity.
Day by day they must have just enough. But the civilized man has
spiritual wants and they are as elastic as air.

A home is a house well filled with these elastic wants. Home-culture is
getting such wants into households--not merely into single
individuals--that lack them. What makes a man rich? Is the term merely
comparative? Not merely. To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of
our bodily needs, abundant means to supply our spiritual wants. To
possess more material resources than we can or will use or bestow to the
spiritual advantage of ourselves and others is to be perilously rich,
whether we belong to a grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a
royal family. Why is it so often right that a rich college, for example,
should, in its money-chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily supply
more spiritual wants if it had more money.

Not low wages will ever make men harmless, nor high wages make them
happy, nor low nor high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of
malignant envy; but having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and
having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the
surplus--spiritual wants, that know both how to suffer need and how to
abound, and to do either without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever
would help this state of things on, let him seek at the same time to
increase the home's wage-earning power and its spiritual powers to put
to fine use the wages earned: to augment the love of beauty in nature
and in art, the love of truth and knowledge, the love of achievement and
of service, the love of God and of human society, the ambition to put
more into the world than we get out of it. Wages will never be too
high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or too few, which follow
that "sliding scale." How much our garden contest may do of this sort
for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know; last year was its
first in the competition. But it has shown the ambition to enter the
lists, and a number that promised no more at the outset have since won
prizes. One such was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by
stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer