urneys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children,--that guests
should be invited with a view to their improvement,--that some
intimacies should be chosen and some rejected on their account. But it
is _not_ well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out
before the child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere
where everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with
reference to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect combined
with real care and never-ceasing watchfulness has often seemed to do
wonders in this work of setting human beings on their own feet for the
life-journey.

Education is the highest object of home, but education in the widest
sense,--education of the parents no less than of the children. In a true
home the man and the woman receive, through their cares, their
watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and highest finish
that earth can put upon them. From that they must pass upward, for earth
can teach them no more.

The home-education is incomplete, unless it include the idea of
hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a biblical and apostolic virtue,
and not so often recommended in Holy Writ without reason. Hospitality is
much neglected in America for the very reasons touched upon above. We
have received our ideas of propriety and elegance of living from old
countries, where labor is cheap, where domestic service is a
well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted cheerfully for life, and
where of course there is such a subdivision of labor as insures great
thoroughness in all its branches. We are ashamed or afraid to conform
honestly and hardily to a state of things purely American. We have not
yet accomplished what our friend the Doctor calls "our weaning," and
learned that dinners with circuitous courses and divers other
Continental and English refinements, well enough in their way, cannot be
accomplished in families with two or three untrained servants, without
an expense of care and anxiety which makes them heart-withering to the
delicate wife, and too severe a trial to occur often. America is the
land of subdivided fortunes, of a general average of wealth and comfort,
and there ought to be, therefore, an understanding in the social basis
far more simple than in the Old World.

Many families of small fortunes know this,--they are quietly living
so,--but they have not the steadiness to share their daily average
l