eds all her force to rise
above the gloom of earth, and to realize the mysteries of faith? Why
shut the friendly sunshine from the mourner's room? Why muffle in a
white shroud every picture that speaks a cheerful household word to
the eye? Why make a house look stiff and ghastly and cold as a corpse?
In some of our cities, on the occurrence of a death in the family, all
the shutters on the street are closed and tied with black crape, and
so remain for months. What an oppressive gloom must this bring on a
house! how like the very shadow of death! It is enlisting the nerves
and the senses against our religion, and making more difficult the
great duty of returning to life and its interests. I would have
flowers and sunshine in the deserted rooms, and make them symbolical
of the cheerful mansions above, to which our beloved ones are gone.
Home ought to be so religiously cheerful, so penetrated by the life of
love and hope and Christian faith, that the other world may be made
real by it. Our home life should be a type of the higher life. Our
home should be so sanctified, its joys and its sorrows so baptized and
hallowed, that it shall not be sacrilegious to think of heaven as a
higher form of the same thing,--a Father's house in the better
country, whose mansions are many, whose love is perfect, whose joy is
eternal."

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER

I

WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HER? OR, THE WOMAN QUESTION

"Well, what will you do with her?" said I to my wife.

My wife had just come down from an interview with a pale, faded-looking
young woman in rusty black attire, who had called upon me on the very
common supposition that I was an editor of the "Atlantic Monthly."

By the by, this is a mistake that brings me, Christopher Crowfield,
many letters that do not belong to me, and which might with equal
pertinency be addressed, "To the Man in the Moon." Yet these letters
often make my heart ache,--they speak so of people who strive and
sorrow and want help; and it is hard to be called on in plaintive
tones for help which you know it is perfectly impossible for you to
give.

For instance, you get a letter in a delicate hand, setting forth the
old distress,--she is poor, and she has looking to her for support
those that are poorer and more helpless than herself: she has tried
sewing, but can make little at it; tried teaching, but cannot now get
a school,--all places being filled, and more than filled; at last has
tried literature