many annoyances as they have had, Xantippe would have been
an angel compared with you. It is easier to take care of five
rollicking, romping children than of one childish old man. Among the
best women of Brooklyn and of yonder transpontine city are those who
allowed the bloom of life to pass away while they were caring for
their parents. While other maidens were sound asleep, they were
soaking the old man's feet or tucking up the covers around the invalid
mother. While other maidens were in the cotillon, they were dancing
attendance upon rheumatism and spreading plasters for the lame back of
the septuagenarian, and heating catnip tea for insomnia.

In almost every circle of our kindred there has been some

QUEEN OF SELF-SACRIFICE

to whom jeweled hand after jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but
who stayed on the old place because of the sense of filial obligation
until the health was gone and the attractiveness of personal presence
had vanished. Brutal society may call such a one by a nickname. God
calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint, and I call her
domestic martyr. A half dozen ordinary women have not as much nobility
as could be found in the smallest joint of the little finger of her
left hand. Although the world has stood six thousand years, this is
the first apotheosis of maidenhood, although in the long line of those
who have declined marriage that they might be qualified for some
especial mission are the names of Anna Ross, and Margaret
Breckinridge, and Mary Shelton, and Anna Etheridge, and Georgiana
Willetts, the angels of the battlefields of Fair Oaks, and Lookout
Mountain, and Chancellorsville, and Cooper Shop Hospital: and though
single life has been honored by the fact that the three grandest men
of the Bible--John and Paul and Christ--were

CELIBATES.

Let the ungrateful world sneer at the maiden aunt, but God has a
throne burnished for her arrival, and on one side of that throne in
heaven there is a vase containing two jewels, the one brighter than
the Kohinoor of London Tower, and the other larger than any diamond
ever found in the districts of Golconda--the one jewel by the lapidary
of the palace cut with the words: "Inasmuch as ye did it to father;"
the other jewel by the lapidary of the palace cut with the words:
"Inasmuch as ye did it to mother." "Over the Hills to the Poorhouse"
is the exquisite ballad of Will Carleton, who found an old woman who
had been turned off by her p