The cook sends up the meat underdone. Mr. Easy remarks, apologetically, that it was a larger piece than usual; as if just there, the cook's judgment, if she had any, was not expected to come in, by putting it on to roast a little earlier, else what is the use of a cook?

Now, Mr. Easy's wife believes in eternal justice—obedience or the guillotine. She thinks that the person who, through indolence, offers a premium for carelessness or incompetency, commits a crime against society. She believes that he has no right to shirk a disagreeable duty because it is disagreeable; or because he is lazy, or because it is pleasant to be popular, and to appear amiable to the outside world. She believes that executive people are the hinges upon which alone the world turns—creaking awfully sometimes, it is true, but, thank God! turning! not rusting. She believes in using the dictionary, and plenty of it, when people need waking up to their duty; and, this accomplished, she believes in laying it on the shelf till again called for. A wrong un-righted pains Mrs. Easy; rouses her fiery indignation. Mr. Easy is never quite sure it is wrong; and, till he is, it is not necessary, in his opinion, to clear the deck for action.

Now, I have no doubt that both styles of persons have their mission in the world, else they wouldn't be here: I have known wasps and snails each to have their admirers. Some day I'll write a book of fables for you, to which Æsop's shall be no circumstance.

I wonder is a man justified, to his own conscience or his Maker, in allowing himself to be so absorbed by "business," beyond what is necessary to the comfortable support of his family, that he is as much a stranger to his own wife and children as if he were only a boarder in the family,—bodily present indeed at two or three meals a day, but totally ignorant of the ponderosity of the domestic machinery, or at what cost of health, or mental and moral deterioration, to his wife, this unrelieved strain is being carried out from day to day.

Perhaps you will answer, Who is to decide what is "a necessary and comfortable support for a family"? I can only ask, if there is not a great wrong unredressed, when a man knows nothing of the different mental or moral characteristics of the children he has launched into a world of temptation and trial, and is also quite content to remain ignorant. I think all intelligent, thinking persons will agree on this point. Also when a man, professional or other, seldom or never addresses a word to his wife about anything but the family expenses, or his favorite mode of cooking any pet article of food. Sure I am that any wife who is not a hopeless idiot, will chafe under such treatment, until, at last, her fate being too much for her, mental and moral deterioration fairly set in, and she hopelessly revolves in her narrow bounds without even a desire that the children, once so dear to her, should ever peep over and beyond them. The friends whom she might and ought to have retained for herself and them, she has gradually, one by one, lost sight of; her husband being never at home to care whether they came or stayed away—his interests, and his friends, being quite separate and apart. Meantime his house shines, his meals are well prepared, and his "buttons" are in place.

This picture is not overdrawn. I can produce you its counterparts any hour in the twenty-four. By and by, the oldest boy outgrows pinafores and jackets, and steps round in long-tails. No father has been at hand, to point out the quicksands he should have avoided, or to encourage him by his sympathy or love to do right. But the devil in all his Protean shapes has been at his elbow, delighted at that father's indifference. Presently some wild oat sown, brings to that home, as yet publicly undisgraced, its full-grown harvest of shame. Now come storms of reproach, under which the loving mother weeps and cowers, as if she, God help her! were guilty. Alas! and alas! were such young wayward feet ever turned right by such injudiciousness and injustice? Does not that boy know that it is the disgrace alone that father feels, and not the shipwreck of his child's soul? Does that father say, even to himself, "Oh, Absalom! my son! my son!" Not at all: he feels only a blind rage, a vexatious thwarting and hindering of his own affairs, which his son has brought about.

"His son?"

It is about the first time he ever regarded him in that relationship.

There is another kind of father and husband, quite the antipodes of this. He devotes himself entirely to the domestic side of the question. He has no "business" to occupy him, nor does he desire to have. He loves his wife devotedly, and the more children he has the better he is pleased. Their mother and themselves are enveloped in a warm atmosphere of love. Never was a harsh, pettish, or fretful word heard from his amiable lips. He plays with the children all day; he fixes kites and balls without stint for them; he tends the baby; and when a crisis comes, and the maid-of-all-work disappears, discouraged at the eleventh baby, he washes the dishes, if need be, as serenely as if he were born to it. Meantime these really bright children, loving and loved, grow apace. The mother is growing old. Love is a good thing, but there is a far-off questioning look in her gentle eyes, vainly searching those children's future. Her hands are now helplessly tied, and she sees no outward tendency toward business in his. She "loves him"—how can she help it?—thus far; but the years move on so quickly, and her children grow so tall! She remembers sadly the advantages of education she had, as she looks into the fair faces of her girls. Ah! how long will she continue to "love" their father? And how will those children, in after years, gauge that "love" which placed such obstacles between them and their best advancement? At what point in their young lives will they, chafing, let go the irresolute hand, that could only lead them up and down that narrow garden-path, when the broad highway of development lay in sight, and untrodden?

I am fully persuaded that if even I had created human beings, I couldn't have improved upon the original programme. I used to think that I should like to sweep the whole pussy-cat tribe of my fellow-creatures out of existence, with one wave of my wand. I am convinced now, that as a means of grace, they had better remain. Their sublime indifference as to the period in which the most momentous questions are to be settled, is instructive to hurricane natures. The fatalistic way in which they subside into their own comfortable chimney-corner, while all the moral elements are in a wild tornado outside, is calming to the spirit. The placidity with which they can eat, and sleep, and drink, and be merry, side by side with the corpses of dead hopes and abortive projects, over which humanity stands weeping and wringing her hands, is as good as a dose of opium. We look at them, and, wiping the cold perspiration from our brow, we ask, Is it possible, then, that we have been lashing ourselves into all this fury, when there is really to be no shipwreck? Are we really on the high road to lunacy without knowing it, and in the near proximity to such sublime self-poise and calmness? We slink into our corner to reflect; and get that much breathing-time and wind to go at the demon again. So you see they are of use, as I told you.

Then there are your critical people, like John Randolph, who actually stopped his dying, to correct the pronunciation of a friend who was waiting to close his eyes. So they will stop you in the midst of a ravishing bit of poetry, or the narration of a story, to dissect the sentiment of it by some glaring Drummond light, that they keep remorselessly on hand for such purposes, while you, poor wretch, dropped suddenly from your sublime height, lose both your place and your temper.

Now you can't say this isn't educational.

Then there is your human chameleon, who takes its color from the last leaf it feeds on. You quote one of its yesterday-expressed opinions, with full assurance of faith, as exactly coinciding with your own. Up comes a third party, and demands how you can so misrepresent the chameleon's views, because that very day it expressed a totally different opinion to this third party. You ask the chameleon for an explanation; when it coolly informs you that consistency is the vice of little minds; and that to unsay to-day what you said yesterday, is a proof of progress. You retire with a muttered wish that the chameleon would furnish you with a pair of seven-league boots, with which to overtake his "progress."

Then there is that social wasp, "I told you so;" who, vulture-like, hovers over the fallen, ready to insert his cruel beak at any sore place one has made, tripping. The guillotine is nothing to the bits of quivering flesh he tears out.

Then there is your routine person, who sneezes precisely at six, and sits down precisely at seven, and rises precisely at eight, and looks out of the window precisely at nine, and keeps this up month after month, and year after year, without the shadow of turning, and in the teeth of imperative exigencies, and with a stony stoicism, and pettiness of purpose, which is exasperating enough to bring on a fit of apoplexy in the beholder.

Nobody can say that this is not equal to any authorized penance in the church, to the sufferer, whose blood has not turned to milk and water. In fact, I have often wondered why our Roman Catholic friends, who have so many excellencies, need trouble themselves to suggest or appoint anything of the kind, when life is so full of crosses and discipline in the raw. When it is so teeming with cross-purposes, that every person you meet seems obstinately bent either upon forming a partnership which, like oil and water, will forever be opposed to mingling, or throwing pebble after pebble into some ocean, expecting that the little circle it makes, will reach to the farthest shore of worldly fame or ambition. In fact, when I have visited lunatic asylums, it has really seemed to me that mad as their inmates undoubtedly are, there is little need to dissever them from their comrades on the outside.

You will perceive from this that I consider life a discipline. I do. No response was ever heartier. When one bubble after another bursts, this, you see, is a comforting reflection to settle down upon. There was once a man who read the lists of deaths every day, hoping to see that of some woman, the whole sisterhood of whom he hated. When he came to one, he always exclaimed, "Thank God, there's another of 'em gone!" My moral is obvious.

Commend me to the person who can say No with a will, when it is needed; who is not deterred from it for fear of being called "disagreeable," or "being thought to be always in hot water." Any water but lukewarm water for me! One of my favorite passages in the Good Book is this: "I would that thou wert either cold or hot; but because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." The joke comes in here: that your timid conservative is always the first to raise the signal of distress on any emergency for the speedy arrival of "that disagreeable person who is always in hot water." He likes him marvellously as such crises of his existence? Now, beyond dispute, everybody likes to travel on a smooth-beaten road without jolting, if possible; but in order for this, somebody must make a great turn-over generally, in clearing away the stones that obstruct it. Now, I consider it a cowardly piece of business for either man or woman, to travel miles around that road, rather than take hold and do their fair share of the disagreeable work, either from indolence, or from fear that they might offend one who might possibly prefer that the road should remain in its normal condition. Oh, how glad they are when somebody else has taken this troublesome pioneership off their shoulders! How they rub their lazy hands, and smirk, and say, "You see you do these things so well! I never was constituted for it"! Which translated, means, that they prefer sacrificing a principle to sacrificing their ease or popularity; as if anybody liked to keep all the time fighting—as if other people didn't love ease too!