ste. Then there will be danger of
crowding rooms with good things--a great mistake also: an ornament
should have a simple background, should 'shew like metal on a sullen
ground.' Rooms, from temptations of wealth or taste, should never
become mere pretty curiosity-shops. Forbearance and self-control are
necessary in this as in all things. 'To gild refined gold' is worse
than useless.

Let us not question the need of such thought and care for mere
dwelling-places. Are not rooms the nurseries of the young spirits
among us, the resting-places of all others on their pilgrimage? And
because everything is important that influences and educates the
soul, love and thought shall work together in our homes, and create in
all details something akin to the universal harmony they should
typify.

INVESTMENTS!

What is to be done with the money which is realised in the ordinary
course of affairs, has latterly become a kind of puzzle. There it goes
on accumulating as a result of industry; but what then? A person can
but eat one dinner in the day; two or three coats are about all he
needs for the outer man; he can but live in one house at a time; and,
in short, after paying away all he needs to pay, he finds that he has
not a little over for--investment. Since our young days, this word
investment has come remarkably into use. All are looking for
investments; and as supply ordinarily follows demand, up there rise,
at periodical intervals, an amazing number of plans for the said
investments--in plain English, relieving people of their money. A few
years ago, railways were the favourite absorbents. Railways, on a
somewhat more honest principle, may possibly again have their day.
Meanwhile, the man of money has opened up to him a very comprehensive
field for the investment of his cash: he can send it upon any mission
he chooses; he may dig turf with it, or he may dig gold; he may catch
whales, or he may catch sprats, or do fifty other things; but if he
see it again after having relinquished his hold upon it, he must have
exercised more discretion than falls to the lot of the majority of Her
Majesty's lieges in their helter-skelter steeple-chasing after 20 per
cent. Our present business, however, is not with legitimate
speculation, but with schemes in which no discretion is exercised, or
by which discretion is set to sleep--in a word, with bubble
investments; and the history of many of the most promising of these
speculations ma