MR. HALEY FISK, NEW YORK CITY:5

Every baby cannot be born into a luxurious home-cannot find awaiting it a dainty, hygienic nursery, rivalling in beauty the misty cloud-land.

But it is every child's rightful heritage to be born into a clean, healthful home where the Blue Bird of Happiness dwells.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A Prayer for the Family:

Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank thee for the place in which we dwell, for the love that unites us, for the peace accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of earth. Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Offenders, give us the grace to accept and forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of others. Give us courage and faith and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another. As the clay to the potter, as the windmill to the wind, as children of their sire we beseech of thee this help and mercy for Christ's sake.

Send to Mr. Fisk, 1 Madison Ave., New York City, for "Baby Booklet."

II. THE FAMILY CIRCLE

Self-love is a virtue, but a narrow virtue. How shall one who has intelligent self-love develop a broader love so that he shall be capable at last of loving his uttermost neighbor as himself?

The first thing that comes to the self-loving man to broaden him out is a beautiful thing that we treat too lightly. It is as beautiful as the budding of a flower-his love for one woman. As Jamie Souter says in "The Bonnie Brier Bush," "The love of one man for one woman is a bonnie thing." It is not hard to love that neighbor as himself-or better. "All the world loves a lover," and if the lover follows the gleam he will soon be a lover of all the world, for that love for a woman blooms into marriage and fruits into parenthood. It is not hard to love that little neighbor as himself—or better. He has reached a second stage in the fulfillment of the Second Great Commandment, and does not know he is doing anything Scriptural at all.

As the tides of the ocean are drawn by the sun and moon, so the affections of that man's heart are drawn out by the love of his wife on one side, and by the love of his child on the other. And to the mother heart the love of the husband draws like the sun, and the child's love draws like the moon. And to the child's heart, father's love draws like the sun, and mother's love like the moon. Thus we come to the first of the circles of love, the family circle, made up of the father, the mother, and the child, the unity in trinity that should make every family a holy family.

The family is the unit of society-not the individual, as the census taker would have us believe; not even the married pair; but the family. A town or city is a field of three-leaved clovers, each family unit made up of fatherhood, motherhood and childhood.

Bachelor Men and Bachelor Maids Mere Fractions

A proper census would show that a city contains a certain number of families, and all bachelor women and

THE HOLY FAMILY From Müller's Picture in Metropolitan Museum, New York This is one of the few pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Divine Child in which the face of Jesus, not that of Mary, is the centre to which all eyes turn. It is also almost the only Madonna in which the mother is not too old, as girls were then betrothed at twelve. Mary as a mother was therefore not more than a teen-age maiden, for the gospel story tells of her recent betrothal.

bachelor men would be recorded as fractions. The Latins have a motto, "Unus homo, nullus homo," one homo, no homo; freely translated, "A bachelor is nobody."

I do not wish to say anything discourteous to the bachelor women who are allowing me to speak to them, nor even to the bachelor men, who ought to know better. I have great respect for some of these singular people. Few have served their generation better than that uncrowned maiden queen, Dr. Frances E. Willard, so long the leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was one of the few women who received the degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) and few men were ever so worthy of it.

I have a similar esteem for many other bachelor maids in our churches and missions and charities and in the teaching force of our schools, who are as faithful if not as famous as she. And even among our bachelor men there are some lucid intervals. But, speaking sociologically, each bachelor man and bachelor maid is a half-hinge, lying around in the factory waiting for the other half-hinge to be found. And my best wish for every half-hinge is that the other half may be found—the very one, you know, for better be a half-hinge forever than a misfit.

Every normal man and woman desires to complete his or her life by union with another kindred soul, and there is seldom a good reason why a man should remain fractional through life; but it is a fact of serious concern to the nation and to the world that there are not enough clean and intelligent young men to furnish mates for the pure and educated young women, and so many of them marry into a lower stratum morally and intellectually, only to end up in separation or divorce. Miss Alice Cary, the maiden poetess, being asked if she had been "disappointed