bashful literary visitor; lively gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen;
knitting for Grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and gunpowder for Young
Restless, whose beard is just beginning to grow;--and they never fall
into pets, because the canary-bird won't relish the dog's bone, or the
dog eat canary-seed, or young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty's
review, or young Master Restless take delight in knitting-work, or old
Grandmamma feel complacency in guns and gunpowder.

Again, there are others who lay the foundations of family life so
narrow, straight, and strict, that there is room in them only for
themselves and people exactly like themselves; and hence comes much
misery.

A man and woman come together out of different families and races, often
united by only one or two sympathies, with many differences. Their first
wisdom would be to find out each other's nature, and accommodate to it
as a fixed fact; instead of which, how many spend their lives in a blind
fight with an opposite nature, as good as their own in its way, but not
capable of meeting their requirements!

A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business family, where her father
and brothers bore everything along with true worldly skill and energy,
falls in love with a literary man, who knows nothing of affairs, whose
life is in his library and his pen. Shall she vex and torment herself
and him because he is not a business man? Shall she constantly hold up
to him the example of her father and brothers, and how they would manage
in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once for all to
herself,--"My husband has no talent for business; that is not his forte;
but then he has talents far more interesting: I cannot have everything;
let him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well, and let me try to
make up for what he cannot do; and if there be disabilities come on us
in consequence of what we neither of us can do, let us both take them
cheerfully"?

In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of an adoring family one
of those delicate, petted singing-birds that seem to be created simply
to adorn life and make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to
compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the
material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are
strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything
but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself
and her