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upon the still evening air resound the blows of the farmer's axe as he prepares the wood for the Monday washing. All of this I saw,—I, too, longed to be free, but alas! the inexorable Sabbath held me till the morrow.

This was the extreme, and it is thus that in the end all extremes caricature the truth. The idea of preparing for Sunday was a good one, but the loosening of all restraint upon the Sunday evening-a virtual compensation for the thrall of the evening previous was an inconsistency unworthy of the day, ludicrous in many respects at the time, and injurious in its influence. At school, in other places, I encountered, in a mitigated form, the use of the Saturday evening as a preparation for the ensuing day, and I have seen something of it in homes, and I pronounce it good. Many a little household duty may just as well be attended to on Saturday evening as left to worry and harass a morning, the most pressed and anxious of all the week if the truth were told - in many a home. It would be a great wisdom in the head of the home to insist that a certain class of Sunday necessities should be attended to on Saturday, and a greater wisdom still if a later portion of the evening should be used for such reading and thought as will gradually bring the mind away from its world-life, and prepare it to enter upon the higher duties and privileges of the

morrow. Largely the Sunday fails of accomplishing what it should, because it finds us unprepared. We break sharply and reluctantly and but half away from the routine of ordinary life, rather at the compulsions of a regular hour than from the impellings of the heart. We need a gradual toning down of thought and life. We cannot really enjoy and improve Sunday without it. The great gulf we fix between our week-days and our Sundays, between our world-life and our soul-life, we cannot jump or bridge, but must pass quietly and deliberately over. Saturday evening should be for the subsiding of the things of the world, that the dawn of the morrow may be the right dawning for the first day of the week. It should be as the porch to the temple of the Sabbath.

I have brought with me from childhood a reminiscence of Saturday afternoons, which I enjoy vastly as a reminiscence, but in vain strive to produce again as a fact. I cannot make Saturday afternoon seem as Saturday afternoon used to. All things about them wore a peculiar aspect. All sounds and silence even were unlike what they were at other times. It was as if all Nature were preparing for the Sabbath, if her unpolluted ear caught from far the first signal of the approaching of one of the days of the Son of man, and reverently prepared to meet it. nights shut down around us as calm and still, just

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as sweet and cheerful were the evening songs of the birds, just as content the loitering cows coming from the pasture, just as long and silent the shadows upon the fields and away off upon the hills, each night as then; but there was a something ineffable of peace, content, rest, that no other evening had, a foreshadowing of the Sabbath, which must have been caught unconsciously from those preparatory duties always associated with the last evening of the week. It was a feeling of childhood, perhaps, and like childhood has passed away forever; but as David longed for the water of the well by the gate of Bethlehem, so have I longed to feel as I once did on the evening of the day preceding the Sabbath.

The Sabbath comes. How perfect and how grate ful is its silence! Dumb is labor and hushed all tumult and care. Even the great marts of trade are deserted, and cities rest. The very birds sing a new song, and a certain delicious soothing greets you at your waking, and murmurs to you gratefully: "This is the day the Lord has made." Dull and dead must he be beyond the dulness and deadness of the mere sluggard, who does not feel some awakening of the better man within him at the hallowed advent of the Sabbath morning.

At the very threshold of the day, we meet with that which has much to do with the character of our home

Sundays. I mean that general habit of self-indulgence which permits two or three extra hours of sleep on Sunday. I do not believe there is any one thing introduces so much trouble and vexation into the home, tends to so much Sabbath-breaking, and gives rise to more and more various disturbance, than this habit, which ought to be honored only in the breach. What a record would the Sunday mornings at home of a village or city be, and what varied unhappiness should we find beginning there and dragging its troubled trail through the livelong day, "from morn till dewy eve." The day has not started right, and it cannot go on right. Something is lost that cannot be found; something escaped that cannot be recaptured. Squandered at the drowsy importunacy of the body is time that was not yours to squander. Your home had a claim upon it,- made a direct demand of it. Your selfishness clogged or stopped the domestic wheels. The day long it suffers because of you. Something is omitted, or is imperfect, or postponed. I grant that there are sometimes those upon whom labor lays so heavy a hand that the Sunday demands some longer indulgence in sleep; but in the vast majority of cases the plea for the necessity is simply the plea of our indolence. It is the sluggard's plea. You do not take special interest in Sunday. You have got nothing to do. Sunday is a day of rest, and

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so you turn again to slumber. Is there not something of self-reproach when at last you fairly rouse yourself, and feel that it is late, when you hurry yourself and hurry others and are hurried by them, and when all your hurrying will not bring things as they ought to be? Your domestics have taken their cue from you, and they are late. Your breakfast is late. Things that ought to have been done yesterday,shoes that ought to have been blacked, hats and gloves that ought to have been found, buttons that ought to have been sewed on, all come at the last impossible moment to be done, all importunate, — making of the Sunday morning at home clatter and confusion and worry,—destroying its peace, unsettling the mind, unstringing the nerves, and the second bell calls perturbed and every way illy prepared spirits to the sacred solemnities of worship, hurries you late into church, or keeps you in vexation at home. Ah! the wretchedness every week entailed upon homes, every week repeated, because of the needless extra sleep of the Sunday morning!

It is a wretched mistake men make when they take it for granted that the prime purpose of the Sabbath is physical rest, and that so they have the right to use its hours in a dull animal torpor. Inordinate lying in bed is not the sort of rest that even the animal economy demands. Idleness does not rest the mind, lazi

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