een natives of one happy clime
And its dear accent to our utterance clung.
And were another childhood world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."
--GEORGE ELIOT, in _Brother and Sister_.

"When love is strong it never tarries to take heed
Or know if its return exceed
Its gift; in its sweet haste no greed,
No strife belong.
It hardly asks if it be loved at all, to take
So barren seems, when it can make
Such bliss, for the beloved's sake,
Of bitter tasks."--H.H.

=Ancient Kinship Bond.=--The relation of brothers and sisters in the
family group has passed through many changes and must at times have
caused much confusion and difficulty in the home. For example, in that
state of familial association in which all the brothers of a certain
relationship were considered as husbands of all sisters within a
certain bond there must have been some heart-burnings and several
kinds of family unpleasantness. We have some hints of these from many
historical sources. In the era of complete subjection of the
individual to the community such unpleasantness may have counted only
for negligible unhappiness on the part of a few social rebels, but the
custom alluded to did not prove to work well enough to become
permanent.

Again, the form of family bond which demanded that a man take to wife
the widow of his dead brother and "raise up children to the name" of
the deceased had a long but not a permanent life. In the well-known
passage from Deuteronomy, the 25th chapter, the faithful are commanded
that "if brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no
son, the wife of the dead shall not be married without unto a
stranger: her husband's brother shall ... take her to him to wife, and
perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her. And the first-born
... shall succeed in the name of his brother that is dead, that his
name be not blotted out of Israel." The same passage shows that while
it was doubtless at first an imperative social law, there came a time
when the living brother had a choice as to whether or not he should
take to wife the widow of one who had died. Perhaps there might have
been an economic pressure that made it difficult to perform this
ancient duty. Perhaps there might have been objection from the wife or
wives already in command of the household matters. Perhaps the widow
was sometimes of a type to make the brotherly and family duty