scandal; the thing does not happen. Lonely evenings for husbands in the daily routine are exceptional unless the heats of summer drive women from home that little children may grow in health and beauty in the hills or by the sea. In our fiercely torrid climate there are breaks in homelife that cannot be helped when a man is tied to the counter and his wife must for a while convey the little ones to a cooler atmosphere. Exceptions of this description are accepted without a murmur by the indulgent and self-effacing American husband and father.

I heard the other day a pretty story of a mutually devoted husband and wife who spend their evenings together with a single reservation. On Saturday afternoon the husband is free from business, and he stays at home then, watching over and amusing the little one, while the wife takes her weekly jaunt. Saturday afternoon is hers for visiting, shopping or any other recreation she may desire. On Saturday evening, the husband goes to his club and the wife, refreshed by her outing, gladly releases him from attendance on her. This compact, made by two sensible and devoted people, is eminently wise, and their example is worth following.

Love of home is not the peculiar attribute of

either sex. Deeply rooted in human nature in every civilized land, the love of home belongs as much to men as to women. With passionate earnestness and with yearning homesickness, men under foreign skies look backward to the old roof and the old soil and the old associations. The soldier by the camp-fire far away seizes with eager hands the letter from home; the man looking up from the deck of a vessel at unfamiliar skies wishes that he were standing by the gate with the daylilies white in the sheen of the moon, and the scent of his father's pipe, homely and keen, seems wafted to him over leagues of land and sea. If a boy or man does not cling to his home, something has gone wrong with him. Home means to a man as much as to a woman, although his work is for it rather than in it, and his part of its actual labour is confined to the cellar, the barn, the furnace, the woodshed and the chores. When a man locks and bars his house at night and turns out the gas, though the home be ever so small and plain and ever so obscure, he has some glimmering of the feeling men had when they kept the medieval castle strongly entrenched by mote and drawbridge, and defended it thus from all intrud

ers.

A man's home is his best protection from those

unseen marauders that assault the soul and find for attack its weakest point. A good home furnishes a man with armour of proof against the wiles of the devil.

WOMAN of middle age whose early opportunities were few is sometimes very much disheartened when she compares herself with her friends, or, possibly, with her own e feels at a disadvantage in society sensitive on the subject of her shortcompany she inclines to silence o speech, being aware of difficulties existent for her clever sons and he does not want to make them er range is narrow. She has had reading and less for society. Her en occupied literally in a routine of

tasks that have had more to do with body than with mind.

Probably this woman and others of her type should take courage. They exaggerate the situation. The deficiencies are less glaring than the partially educated imagine, life itself being the best of schools and experience the most successful of teachers. No one in the least receptive can spend the years between twenty and fifty in this country and this period without absorbing useful knowledge at every pore. We can turn nowhere without encountering something or somebody whose province it is, quite without intention, to give suggestions.

Wide-awake and energetic people are in a way independent of other culture than that which is imparted by the mere fact of living in a community where there are schools and churches. Even the duller and more lethargic are stimulated from time to time by the forces around them, forces quickening thought and broadening outlook. We cannot wholly escape the influences that belong to the era in which we live.

We will suppose, nevertheless, that our discouraged friend is right in her estimate of her ignorance of the subjects with which her acquaintances are familiar. We will suppose her thus illiter