Here was the poise of the perfect housekeeper whose head did not fail her, although there was no little heartache in the flight from home, a flight from a whirlwind of devouring flame.

To sum up the matter, a woman to-day may do almost whatever she pleases.

If there be a guardian angel whose especial province is to watch over the home and make sweet and pure its spirit in prosperity and adversity, that angel hovers most lovingly over the woman at the head of the household. The spiritual atmosphere that pervades a home, and makes it something more than a mere house where people eat and sleep, is dependent on mothers, wives, daughters and sisters. They are responsible for the life within their little realm. A woman may go to business daily, stand behind a counter, sit at a desk or sell goods from door to door, but when she returns to her domicil at nightfall, the spirit of the home steps over the threshold with her. Whether or not woman designs it, by the law of her being she is the pervading genius of the household, and although it may sound trite and familiar by repetition, home is her inner sphere from which she must broaden out. A man all by himself may make a palace or a museum or an art gallery, but all by himself he cannot make a real home.

The seamy side of home-making strangely enough is most often seen where a wife is too domestic. A woman who lives only for her house and for her family seldom keeps pace with her husband and children intellectually and sympathetically. She is so anxious to have her table as it should be, her dining-room in spotless order, and her periodical cleaning and polishing done, that she has no time for anything else. Outside interests of some sort are necessary if one's mental powers are to grow. These interests should not be, when it can be helped, in the line of wageearning. Longing to help their husbands, women sometimes attempt tasks beyond their strength. The ordinary care of a home and the management of children are enough to tax the energies of a wife and mother, and she should not undertake beyond these duties any other work unless there is real need.

An infirm or crippled husband may not be able to provide for his household, and the maintenance of it may therefore fall on the wife, but if he be well and able-bodied he should do the earning and his wife should regulate the spending, in so far as the home administration is concerned. Frugal living does no one harm. It is because we demand extravagances that so much money seems desir

able. A weary, fretted and unhappy wife is no help to her husband, though she may add to his income and procure for herself luxuries that are beyond his power to give her.

What shall the outside interests be that keep a woman blithe, cheery and young, if they are not those in which she enters the great markets of competition? There are always people near who may be helped. If one has no neighbours to whom she may talk, she may write letters to friends at a distance, and keep in loving touch with them. We underrate the charm of a letter. In some lives there are so few happenings worth narrating that the coming of the postman with an envelope bearing one's name is an event. Fancy the life of an invalid away from home, in Arizona or New Mexico, or Winnipeg, with none of her own home people near. Would not a letter from an old schoolmate across the continent bring her a waft of cheer that would keep her heart warm for many a day? It is always wise to belong to some great association for doing good. We are wonderfully enlarged if we have lines of human sympathy extending from our firesides to the ends of the earth.

Our children receive the impression of our breadth or narrowness, and they are the better for

having in the home some one who is not always hurried and worried, but who has leisure to listen to them when they have little trials and plenty of time to share their joys.

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

F a man all by himself cannot successfully make a home neither can a woman all by herself. Bachelor establishments and spinster colonies may be equipped with every modern appliance for comfort and luxury, but they signally fail in acquiring the touch of completeness that is found wherever two wholesome, truehearted human beings, man and woman, unite their destinies in a marriage that is founded on love. Marriage with any lower consideration than love for its basis is fore-doomed, if not to failure, to an abortive incompleteness. Neither a convent