the
maiden feels an undefined spell thrown around her by him who will become
her husband. She feels differently in his presence; she watches him with
other eyes than she has for the rest of men. She renders no account to
herself of this emotion; she attempts no analysis of it; she does not
acknowledge to herself that it exists. No matter. Sooner or later, if
true to herself, she will learn what it is, and it will be a guide in
that moment, looked forward to with mingled hopes and fears, when she
is asked to decide on the destiny, the temporal and eternal destiny, of
two human lives.

That she may then decide aright, and live free from the regrets of a
false step at this crisis of life, we shall now rehearse what medical
science has to say about

HOW TO CHOOSE A HUSBAND.

'Choose well. Your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.'

Woman holds as an inalienable right, in this country, the privilege of
choice. It is not left to notaries, or parents, to select for her, as is
the custom in some other parts of the world.

First comes the question of relationship. A school-girl is apt to see
more of her cousins than of other young men. Often some of them seek at
an early hour to institute a far closer tie than that of blood. Is she
wise to accept it?

SHALL COUSINS MARRY?

Hardly any point has been more warmly debated by medical men. It has
been said that in such marriages the woman is more apt to be sterile;
that if she have children, they are peculiarly liable to be born with
some defect of body or mind,--deafness, blindness, idiocy, or lameness;
that they die early; and that they are subject, beyond others, to fatal
hereditary diseases, as cancer, consumption, scrofula, etc.

An ardent physician persuaded himself so thoroughly of these evils
resulting from marriage of relatives, that he induced the Legislature
of Kentucky to pass a law prohibiting it within certain degrees of
consanguinity. Many a married couple have been rendered miserable by the
information that they had unwittingly violated one of nature's most
positive laws. Though their children may be numerous and blooming, they
live in constant dread of some terrible outbreak of disease. Many a
young and loving couple have sadly severed an engagement, which would
have been a prelude to a happy marriage, when they were informed of
these disastrous results.

For all such we have a word of consolation. We speak it authoritatively,
and not without a