, the shivering wanderer returns to the fold, "curtained and
closed and warm--" to gather force for to-morrow's strain.

"Love, rest and home!"

we sing with moistened eyes. The blessed three are put in trust with
woman. Other stations of honor and usefulness may be opened to her,
but this is the realm of which nothing can dispossess her. The leaven
that leavens the nations is wrought by her hands. Hers is the seedtime
that determines what harvest the Master shall reap. To her is
committed the holy task of preserving all that we can know of a lost
paradise until we see the light flash out for our eager eyes from the
wide doors of what--when we would draw it nearest and make it dearest
to our hearts--we call our Changeless Home.

CHAPTER I.

SISTERLY DISCOURSE WITH JOHN'S WIFE CONCERNING JOHN.

John is not John until he is married. He assumes the sobriquet at the
altar as truly as his bride takes the title of "Mistress" or "Madame."
Once taken, the name is generic, inalienable and untransferable. Yet,
as few men marry until they have attained legal majority, it follows
that your John--my John--every wife's John--must have been in making
for a term of years before he fell into our hands.

Sometimes he is marred in the making.

The most loyal wife admits to her inmost self in the most confidential
season of self-communion, that she could have brought up her husband
better than his mother or whatever feminine relative had the training
of him succeeded in doing. An opinion which, I remark, is not shared
by the relative in question. The mother of a growing son will know how
to sympathize with her Mamma-in-law, when her own son--

"--will a-wooing go,
Whether his mother will or no."

I am John's advocate and best friend, but I cannot withhold the
admission that he has some grave faults, and one or two incurable
disabilities. Grappling, forthwith, with the most obstinate of these
last--I name it boldly. John is not--he never can be--and would not be
if he could--a woman. Taking into consideration the incontrovertible
truth that nobody but a woman ever understood another woman--the
situation is serious enough. So desperate in fact, that every mother's
daughter of the missionary sex is fired with zealous desire to mend
it, and chooses for a subject her own special John--_in esse_ or _in
posse_.

This may sound like badinage, but it is uttered in sad earnest. The
wife's irrational longing to extr