one of the best rules you can follow. Who has not
known of the premature withering of young business men and lawyers
(yes, and sometimes men not so young, alas!) who have suddenly
blossomed out with houses and clothes and horses, and a lot of other
things which their business or practise ought not reasonably to stand.

On the other hand, do not begin your life as a miser. Do not let the
new home proclaim by its barrenness that it is the abode of a poor
young man asking sympathy and aid of his friends. "Yes, rent a piano,
by all means. Do not economize on your wife and your home," advised an
old Methodist preacher noted for his horse-sense. And he was right.

After all, what is the purpose and end of all your labor? If it is not
that very home, I do not know what it is. Put on a little more steam,
therefore, and earn enough extra to buy a picture. And get a good one
while you are at it. It will not break you up to buy a really good
etching. A fine "print" is infinitely better than a poor painting.
Anything is better than a poor painting. If she has good taste, your
wife will make the walls of that new home most attractive with an
astonishingly small amount of money.

It is the new _home_ you and she are making, remember that. Very well;
you cannot make it in a flat. "Apartments" cannot by any magic be
converted into a home. For the purposes of a _home_, better a separate
dwelling with dry-goods box for table and camp-stools for chairs than
tapestried walls, mosaic floors, and all luxuriousness in those modern
structures where human beings hive.

These buildings have their indispensable uses, but home-making is not
one of them. "Apartments" are not cheaper for you and easier for her
than a house to yourselves--no, not if you got the finest apartments
for nothing, not even if you were paid to live in gilded rooms. For
the making of a home is priceless. And that cannot be done in flats or
hotels or other walled and roofed herding places. Every man would like
to have a picture of "the house he was born in"; but who would choose
a hotel for a birthplace? Boniface himself would not "admire" (to use
one of our Westernisms) to have you select his hostelry for that
purpose.

Of course you will spend all of your extra time at home. That is what
home is for. Live in your home; do not merely eat and sleep there. It
is not a boarding-house, remember that. Books are there, and music and
a human sympathy and a marvelous care for y