family, as take his family with him to his joys and pleasures. You meet a Yankee upon a holiday, and he is either alone or with some one of his own sex seeking amusement; you meet an Irishman, he is stalking onward with his hands in his pocket, while puffing and toiling behind him, with baby and bundle, shuffles and sweats his wife; but the German comes with all his household gods, lending a hand at the babies, good-natured and thoughtful of the good wife, and though, like Mrs. John Gilpin, "of a frugal mind," determined that the time shall be a good one generally. He takes his home with him where he goes, and so God bless him for that; but I think he and it go too much to make it ever the one great love. Indeed, the German love seems to be rather for the Fatherland than the one home spot, while that Swiss homesickness, of which we hear so much, is largely a pining for the free mountain air and the wild mountain life. Climate, temperament, seclusion, combine to make the English homes, and that of those who are English in descent, the peculiar and separate However false we or they may be to it, we should all be grateful that we have so pure a model as the ideal Anglo-Saxon home.

places they are.

In ordaining the home the Divine Mind seems to have laid broadly and deeply the foundations of an institution which should satisfy the wants of the most

uncultured, at the same time that it should be capable of stretching itself out so as to satisfy the highest aspirations of the most refined. Doubtless the primeval homes before the flood answered every desire, as those within the Arctic Circle, of which Dr. Kane has given such graphic description, still do. Man at an advanced stage of culture is not content with these. They only offend. His home must be a very different thing, not only outwardly, but inwardly; not only in all its daily ordering and purpose, but in its very commencement. At a low stage of advancement, that commencement may be of no special moment. Upon what principle the male and female come together may be unimportant. It may be a matter of barter, or of compulsion, or of caste, or of any whim or accident. Where the woman is to be the drudge, or slave, to grind the corn, drag the plough, or carry the burdens, where the man is the indolent tyrant or lord, the hunter or warrior alternating with the lethargic brute, and the children are to grow only to the same stature, it makes little odds how the family is brought together. There are no special duties and obligations arising from the connection, to be influenced decidedly one way or the other by it. But as men advance in civilization, and become amenable to Christian laws, the manner in which a home shall be commenced is of first and lasting importance. Every

thing in its success depends upon the fitness of the founders of the home to each other and their work. They who propose to marry have in the outset a most difficult question to settle. It is not one in which fancy, or passion, or property, or position, or caprice, custom, or convenience, should have a word to say. They have to consult, not merely for the present, but for the future; not merely their own good, but the good of those whom God shall by and by intrust to their charge. It is the most important question given to man's decision, for of it are even the issues of eternity. When I think how inexperienced we are when the choice is made, by what motives we are swayed, by what customs blinded, by what outsides deceived,

when I think how impertinently base considerations thrust themselves in upon a decision so momentous,

-I wonder that so many escape a fatal error, that SO many homes are fair and bright with love and promise. When we reflect that the selection is often made, and the future determined, at a time when we consider no habit or principle of character fixed, one may almost marvel that a Divine wisdom should have left the matter to individual decision; and yet God has done in this, as he always does, that which is best. Where we are compelled to go, we find neither happiness nor virtue; and were wives and husbands chosen for us, were marriage a compulsion, and not a

choice, the home would sink rapidly back toward barbarism. Kings, and the so-called nobles, marry thus, but do the chill splendors of their state create a home? May we not define the word home as a thing impossible for kings, and say of it, that freedom of choice is one of the corner-stones of its permanence and purity and value?

While few, I suppose, will deny that the greatest precaution should be exercised in the matter of choice, that marriage should not be the mad freak of a passion or the stupid bargain of convenience or of gold, there is a question lying behind this, not often thought of, but none the less momentous. A writer, whom I cannot but think speaks wisely, says: "The seasonable time for the exercise of prudence is not so much in choosing a wife or a husband, as in choosing with whom you will so associate as to risk the engendering of a passion." And here I shall come to an issue at once with the younger portion of my readers, if not with their parents. The younger will ask, why should you seek to circumscribe the freedom of acquaintance, by suggesting the possibility that out of it may grow some serious, perhaps not wise, affection? I reply, Because serious and not wise affections have again and again sprung out of the unguarded, unsuspecting intercourse of the young. The parents will say, Why suggest the idea of love at all to those too

young to be thinking of it? Why put an awkward constraint upon intimacies and companionships so pleasant and so innocent? I reply, that the idea is in the heads, if not the hearts, of the young already, and we all know it. Every young person of seventeen or eighteen years of age shows by the accidents of conversation, if no other way, that this thing floats more or less distinctly before them. At this age, the young are constantly having their partialities, if not their loves, many affections which shape and control the lives of the parties and of generations do grow up that time, — and knowing that, and how uncontrollable and unaccountable are the leaps and leanings of the young heart, a wise, a religious, even a worldly prudence, would demand care in the choice of associates.

I do not think it prudish or unnecessary to say to those of that age, in presence of the fact of such exposure, Let your society be with those among whom you are not afraid to run the risk of a serious attachment. And I must go a step further back than this, and say that this is not a matter to be left wholly with the inexperience of the young, but should be one of the things thought of by father and mother. The older civilization of England and the Continent attends to this, — in many cases too exclusively attends to it, leaving the child no freedom of choice what