ew fashion, for royalty
has no privacies, and queens and empresses choose their own husbands--a
prerogative that the stoutest champion of woman's rights has not yet had
the hardihood to advocate.

It has always required--but never more than now--no small amount of
moral courage on the part of newly married couples, whose incomes are
moderate, to resist the temptations of extravagant living. As the heads
of young men are often turned by the reports of great fortunes suddenly
acquired, so the ambition seizes upon many a young wife to cut a figure
in "society." Instead of "the household--motions light and free" that
Wordsworth describes, the handmaid of fashion leads the hollow life of
"keeping up appearances." If nothing worse than the slavery of debt is
incurred, home life becomes a counterfeit of happiness; but any one who
watches the daily papers will sometimes see obituaries there more
saddening than those which appear under the head of "Deaths," it is the
list of detected defaulters or peculators or swindlers of some
description--often belonging to the most respectable families. While the
ruin of those evil-doers is sometimes caused by club life or dissipated
habits, yet, in a large number of cases, the temptation to fraud has
been the snare of extravagant living.

In my long experience as a city pastor I have watched the careers of
thousands of married pairs. One class have begun modestly in an
unfashionable locality with plain dress and frugal expenditure They have
eaten the wholesome bread of independence. I wish that every young woman
would display the good sense of a friend of mine, who received an offer
of marriage from a very intelligent and very industrious, but poor young
man who said to her: "I hear that you have offers of marriage from young
men of wealth; all that I can offer you is a good name, sincere love and
plain lodgings at first in a boarding house." She was wise enough to
discover the "jewel in the leaden casket" and accept his hand. He became
a prosperous business man and an officer of my church. As for the other
class, who begin their domestic career by a pitiable craze to "get into
society" and to keep up with their "set" in the vain show, is their fate
not written in the chronicles of haggard and jaded wives, and of
husbands drowned in debt or driven perhaps to stock-gambling or some
other refuge of desperation?

In another portion of this autobiography I have uttered a prayer for the
reviv