e action fine."

Again, there is the trial of

SEVERE ECONOMY.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine households out of the thousand are
subjected to it--some under more and some under less stress of
circumstances. Especially if a man smoke very expensive cigars, and
take very costly dinners at the restaurants, he will be severe in
demanding domestic economies. This is what kills tens of thousands of
women--attempting to make five dollars do the work of seven. How the
bills come in! The woman is the banker of the household; she is the
president, the cashier, the teller, the discount clerk; and there is a
panic every few weeks! This thirty years' war against high prices,
this perpetual study of economics, this life-long attempt to keep the
outgoes less than the income, exhausts millions of housekeepers.

A PREPARATION.

Oh, my sister, this is a part of the divine discipline! If it were
best for you, all you would have to do would be to open the front
windows and the ravens would fly in with food; and after you had baked
fifty times from the barrel in the pantry the barrel, like the one of
Zarephath, would be full; and the shoes of the children would last as
long as the shoes of the Israelites in the wilderness--forty years.
Beside that, this is going to make heaven the more attractive in the
contrast. They never hunger there, and consequently there will be none
of the nuisances of catering for appetites. And in the land of the
white robe they never have to mend anything, and the air in that hill
country makes everybody well. There are no rents to pay; every man
owns his own house, and a mansion at that.

It will not be so great a change for you to have a chariot in heaven
if you have been in the habit of riding in this world. It will not be
so great a change for you to sit down on the banks of the river of
life if in this world you had a country-seat; but if you have walked
with tired feet in this world what a glorious change to mount
celestial equipage; and if your life on earth was domestic martyrdom,
oh, the joy of an eternity in which you shall have nothing to do
except what you choose to do! Martha has had no drudgery for eighteen
centuries! I quarrel with the theologians who want to distribute all
the thrones of heaven among the John Knoxes and the Hugh Latimers, and
the Theban Legion. Some of the brightest thrones of heaven will be
kept for Christian housekeepers. Oh, what a change from here to
there--from the