impossible to bring form out of the chaos without employing
scientific middlemen, and the fascination about helping others almost
vanishes.

Nevertheless, let us cling to the doctrine that

"'T is love, 't is love, 't is love that makes the world go round,"

and even in the city we may all have hope.

X.

THE ESSENTIALS OF A HOME.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred
therewith.

That is, it is the family which makes the home, and this is even truer
of the mother and her daughters than of the father and his sons.
Sometimes even one sunshiny spirit in a house transforms it, and where
all the family are in harmony there cannot fail to be a home in the best
sense.

But there are virtues and virtues. "I admire Miss Strong, indeed I love
her," I heard a lady say not long ago, "but I can't imagine her making a
beautiful home under any circumstances." Yet Miss Strong is gentle,
sweet-tempered, thoroughly unselfish and high-minded, quiet and
unobtrusive, neat and well-bred. Then what is wanting in Miss Strong?

"I think it will be best for Jenny to teach," wrote another lady in
regard to a young girl in whom she was deeply interested, and whose
gifts and graces she had been cataloguing at great length. "At least,
what else is there for a woman to do who is thoroughly feminine but not
at all domestic?"

We think of unselfishness as the first need of a woman who is to be the
presiding genius of a home; but both Miss Strong and Jenny are
conspicuously unselfish.

It seems that though a fine character, and particularly a loving one,
must be the foundation of the home, yet certain special qualities are
necessary. Among the thousands who have read "Robert Elsmere" does any
one feel that Catherine, with all her earnestness and deep love of
others, made her girlhood's home a pleasant place? She was ready to give
up a home of her own, thinking her mother and sisters needed her, and
yet her sister Rose, at least, was secretly longing to be free from the
constant influence of such severe moral standards. In short, Catherine
did not make her home comfortable.

Comfort, I think, enters into every idea of a home. We wish to be
unrestrained there. That, however, is a different thing from being
lawless. There must be moral restraints, even for the sake of the
comfort itself. Otherwise, the freedom of one interferes with the
freedom of another, and finally the reaction tells in