s,--too small for the perception of the naked eye, and
only to be known by the shrivelling and dropping of leaf after leaf that
ought to be green and flourishing.

I have another little fox in my eye, who is most active and most
mischievous in despoiling the vines of domestic happiness,--in fact, who
has been guilty of destroying more grapes than anybody knows of. His
name I find it difficult to give with exactness. In my enumeration I
called him _Self-Will_; another name for him--perhaps a better
one--might be _Persistence_.

Like many another, this fault is the overaction of a most necessary and
praiseworthy quality. The power of firmness is given to man as the very
granite foundation of life. Without it, there would be nothing
accomplished; all human plans would be unstable as water on an inclined
plane. In every well-constituted nature there must be a power of
tenacity, a gift of perseverance of will; and that man might not be
without a foundation for so needful a property, the Creator has laid it
in an animal faculty, which he possesses in common with the brutes.

The animal power of firmness is a brute force, a matter of brain and
spinal cord, differing in different animals. The force by which a
bulldog holds on to an antagonist, the persistence with which a mule
will plant his four feet and set himself against blows and menaces, are
good examples of the pure animal phase of a property which exists in
human beings, and forms the foundation for that heroic endurance, for
that perseverance, which carries on all the great and noble enterprises
of life.

The domestic fault we speak of is the wild, uncultured growth of this
faculty, the instinctive action of firmness uncontrolled by reason or
conscience,--in common parlance, the being "_set in one's way_." It is
the _animal_ instinct of being "set in one's way" which we mean by
self-will or persistence; and in domestic life it does the more mischief
from its working as an instinct unwatched by reason and unchallenged by
conscience.

In that pretty new cottage which you see on yonder knoll are a pair of
young people just in the midst of that happy bustle which attends the
formation of a first home in prosperous circumstances, and with all the
means of making it charming and agreeable. Carpenters, upholsterers, and
artificers await their will; and there remains for them only the
pleasant task of arranging and determining where all their pretty and
agreeable things