an unconscious touch of sacred inspiration in it,
in the selection of the good word "good," which lays peculiar benediction
on all things to which it is set.

If there were no other reason against children's having lessons assigned
them to study at home, we should consider this a sufficient one, that it
robs them of the after-supper hour with their parents. Even if their
brains could bear without injury the sixth, seventh, or eighth hour, as
it may be, of study, their hearts cannot bear the being starved.

In the average family, this is the one only hour of the day when father,
mother, and children can be together, free of cares and unhurried. Even to
the poorest laborer's family comes now something like peace and rest
forerunning the intermission of the night.

Everybody who has any artistic sense recognizes this instinctively when
they see through the open doors of humble houses the father and mother and
children gathered around their simple supper. Its mention has already
passed into triteness in verse, so inevitably have poets felt the sacred
charm of the hour.

Perhaps there is something deeper than on first thoughts would appear in
the instant sense of pleasure one has in this sight; also, in the
universal feeling that the evening gathering of the family is the most
sacred one. Perhaps there is unconscious recognition that dangers are near
at hand when night falls, and that in this hour lies, or should lie, the
spell to drive them all away.

There is something almost terrible in the mingling of danger and
protection, of harm and help, of good and bad, in that one thing,
darkness. God "giveth his beloved sleep" in it; and in it the devil sets
his worst lures, by help of it gaining many a soul which he could never
get possession of in sunlight.

Mothers, fathers! cultivate "after-supper talk;" play "after-supper
games;" keep "after-supper books;" take all the good newspapers and
magazines you can afford, and read them aloud "after supper." Let boys and
girls bring their friends home with them at twilight, sure of a pleasant
and hospitable welcome and of a good time "after supper," and parents may
laugh to scorn all the temptations which town or village can set before
them to draw them away from home for their evenings.

These are but hasty hints, bare suggestions. But if they rouse one heart
to a new realization of what evenings at home _ought_ to be, and what
evenings at home too often are, they have not bee